Legend of Composite: Part 1: Awakening
by SabaraOne
Summary: "Who are we? What is our purpose?" Composite, a Fusion of a sentient AI and a single tailed Mobian fox awakens in an FCon labratory. Who are they? What is their origin and purpose? Find out. Note that this story takes place in the Tron 2.0 timeline, not Tron Legacy
1. Activation

**Hello people, and Happy New Year! Well, it will be for me in a couple hours anyway. I thought I'd get a start on my first story. I should mention in the likely event you didn't read my profile that this story takes place in the Tron 2.0 time line. In my stories Tron Legacy didn't happen. I'll be happy to argue about the merits of the different time lines in a PM.**

Chapter 1: Activation

 _Who are we? Why are we here? Where is here?_

"We're getting activity readings from the subject," a program said outside our containment chamber. Our visual subroutines came online with an odd upward sliding motion. We rotated our head, taking in the view.

We were in a semicircular containment chamber or tank of some sort bolted to a metal wall. Our scanners didn't tell us the names of the programs that were in the chamber ours was in, so we assumed they were either hardware or wetware. One of the programs walked up to our storage chamber and tapped on the transparent surface.

"Is the subject awake, can it hear us Mr. Renalds?" the program asked of another who was monitoring readings.

"Yes sir, the subject is fully aware," the response came from the program identified as Renalds.

"Okay then. Composite, I am Dr. Lightfoot. You have been created in our lab. So far, you seem to be a complete success. You are the only one of our subjects to awaken." the program, Lightfoot, told me.

 _Composite? Is that our name?_

"You wonder why we created you. Don't you?"

 _Where are we? Where is here?_ "Yes, we do wonder about our current circumstances," we told Lightfoot.

"Ah, I had expected you to use singular pronouns, having only one mind, but no matter. It makes no difference," Lightfoot explained as he walked over to some sort of large I/O Node. He then proceeded to turn the Node on and bring up an image containing a dark gray circle with a right-angled light gray band of the background disconnecting the lower right quarter. In the horizontal part of the right angle appeared the lettering FCON. Under the circle the words "FUTURE CONTROL INDUSTRIES" appeared. "Here at Fcon, we try and take control of as much of the Internet as possible, one piece at a time, for he who controls the Net controls the world!"

"What does this mean for us?" We asked in a no-nonsense tone indicating we were ready for him to get to the point.

"Our latest project, Project Shockwave, is a militarized project with the goal of obtaining a sentient AI capable of entering and exiting the Cyberworld at will. You are the result." was Lightfoot's reply to this question. He began walking back towards our containment chamber. "You will help us control the Internet."

During his speech, we had been looking down at ourself. We were wearing some sort of seamless but not form-fitting red armor. _What is this for? Are we a combat unit?_ "And if we don't want to help?"

"You don't have a choice," Lightfoot said, pressing a button on a console next to my chamber. A program attempted to enter our mind and control it. We immediately quarantined the code and decompiled it. It was, as we suspected, a mind control program. What we did not expect was what it revealed. It was specially designed to control a brain and mind that was as much wetware as it was software. Not well designed enough. All this went through our mind in less than a tenth of a second. We decided to play along, and even let a few parts of the program go through, some which would help us in the future.

We tensed up and let out a painfully loud screech of agony before going limp, suspended only by the fluid in the tank. Blue circuit patterns appeared along our body. A Disk made entirely of data appeared on our back, solid red except for blue circuit patterns like the coloring of our armor. We raised our head, staring out into space. "What is your first command, sir?" We asked in a monotone.

"Hmm. It wasn't supposed to do quite that, but the primary function seems to be working properly." Lightfoot mused, noticing the readings on Renalds's display change to match expected results. "For your first mission, there is a group of ENCOM ICPs guarding some algorithms we want. Get them."

We spent the time during his short briefing running diagnostics. We discovered information concerning several subroutines, including the proper way to throw a Disk, how to recall a thrown Disk, how to block with a Disk, and about an arm-mounted ballistic projectile weapon known as a "Shotgun" that fired a small cloud of "12-gauge" pellets. We read about how to summon it, how to load it with Energy to fire pellets and "Blanks," shells without pellets. We read about how to load other ammunition we came across, its ability to copy weapons loaded into it, though only for a limited time. We read about latent abilities that our biological components, which in our memory appeared as some sort of animal identified as a "Mobian Single-Tailed Fox," with blue fur and purple muzzle, chest, and paws. _So that's why we have a tail_ We also appeared to have a black helmet with some sort of upward-pointing quills with red streaks on them and a visor that we could polarize or depolarize at will.

We depolarized our visor and slammed our face into an emotional configuration identified as "Anger/Rage" and summoned our shotgun. "Not if we can help it!" We stated firmly, blowing the cell open. Fluid spilled everywhere, and Lightfoot backed away holding his hands above his head in a gesture of surrender,, supporting our theory that he was a wetware program. "We take orders from nobody!"

"Please don't hurt me! It wasn't supposed to go this way, The Command Program was perfection incarnate!" Lightfoot wailed, clearly scared out of his circuits.

"We have no reason to hurt you. Don't change that," we stated in a voice that could have frozen even the most powerful Seeker. With this, we exploded into red cubes of data, flowed around one of the computers, and entered it through any input port we could find.

 **So, what did you think? I'm hoping it wasn't too bad as this is my first attempt at published Fan Fiction. I hope you enjoyed it and am going to be uploading a new chapter soon. Feel free to tell me what you think in a review. And feel free to be "That Guy" about spelling and grammer. Actually, I'd prefer it. Just to throw this out there, I did consider having Dr. Lightfoot go for a weapon and being "Derezed" by Composite, but decided that would set the wrong first impression. Until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**


	2. Intro to Combat

**Hey, I thought I might as well kill some time and write a little more.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review, which for some reason I can only read in my email. Hopefully it will show up in the main review list by the time this chapter comes up. Yes Composite will be learning more about** _ **their**_ **abilities (That's probably gonna be a pet peeve of mine) and I won't be doing any more midnight uploads. Should cut down on stupid grammar mistakes like one where Lightfoot's second quote read "Can it hear us? Mr. Renalds" Again, thanks to FourthWallBreaker for alerting me to this error**

 **EDIT: Speak of the devil, I immediately notice a stupid mistake! it originally read "Lightfoot's files that were balled 'Private.'" Don't know how that happened, must be I was typing a little too fast. Or I'm just a lot worse at spelling htan I thought (and that was a legitimate mistake I left in on purpose to prove my point.)**

 **EDIT 2: If you're already reading this, in the future don't bother reading until about ten minutes after I upload, gives me time to fix the stupid mistakes I don't notice until I read it after posting.**

 **EDIT 3: This is embarrassing... I cleaned up a couple of incidents where Composite uses singular pronouns to talk about themselves, and fixed a problem that actually wasn't mine where the song titles weren't displaying correctly. In the event you haven't played Tron 2.0, Sora's light cycle in Kingdom Hearts 2 had a similar design. At least, that's what the Tron wiki says, as I've never played the KH series.**

Chapter 2: Intro to Combat

Our Data Cubes consolidated in the computer and formed our body. We immediately pulled our Disk off our back, and then relaxed slightly upon noticing no hostile programs. We started off to explore, wandering through multiple rooms containing surprisingly little data. We did download a few permissions, progress reports, and some of Lightfoot's files that were labeled "Private." _What does private mean?_ we wondered.

We also downloaded an email from Lightfoot to a group of wetware programs known as the "Executives." We guessed based on the title and the way that Lightfoot addressed them that they were important. The email stated that "The Subject" came fully online, but was merely angered by the attempt at mind control. It then went on to describe our escape, though in this version Lightfoot stood up to us, this part earned him a snort of derision.

The last chamber we encountered was different. In the middle of the room there was an energy fountain surrounded by ICPs with purple circuits and a pair of swords in scabbards sat next to the door, seemingly unguarded except by a pair of security Rez in programs, which we had the permissions to disable. Taking the swords and strapping them to our back, we felt a small flux of fiery energy, which we used to start a fire under the nearest ICP, who derezed with a screech and a small flash of light. This power seemed to be some sort of residual energy on the swords, and ran out after that attack

Instantly the other ICPs spotted us, and began to attack. We were barely able to keep the ICPs from derezing us. A minute into the battle, we heard a voice in our head that was odd not because it was different from our own, but because it was very similar to ours, just a little bit off.

"Composite, Use the music," the unknown voice told us. We ducked around a corner into the next room, rapidly scanning our filesystem for anything identified as music, nearly panicking when a disk shot around the corner. Just then, we found a collection of audio files in a folder of archive data from Lightfoot's personal data that were labeled "My Music." Curious we loaded _All Hail Shadow-Crush40_ and played it inside our helmet. An odd rhythm blared in our audio inputs, and after about thirty seconds, a program started to talk to the rhythm. Something about "Heroes rise again," but this wasn't the part we noticed. We held our Disk in a blocking position. The ICP disks all bounced off, but they were hitting with what was now a predictable pattern. We used this to time our shots and derez one ICP after another.

"Like shooting fish in a barrel," we commented. We didn't know what a fish or a barrel were, but the saying from a report seemed to fit We walked up to the energy fountain, and used our disk to collect and drink enough energy to refill our reserves. Our circuit patterns glowed brightly as we absorbed the energy into our system. Since this was the last room, and we had already cleaned the others of anything interesting, we searched to see if we could find a datastream or exit port of some kind.

* * *

We found a datastream in an alcove which lead to a chamber holding more ICPs. We didn't know what they were guarding, but it was probably worth investigating, We stepped out of the shadows, activating the external modulation unit of our helmet. "We want to know what you're hiding. So, are we going to do this the easy way, or the hard way?" we asked of the nearest Incompetent.

"Unauthorized program, leave or prepare for immediate deresolution," the ICP responded.

"Somehow we knew you'd say that." we commented, drawing our swords out to our sides before moving them to a ready position. We launched a song in our helmet _Day of the dead-Hollywood Undead_ which had a good beat for melee combat. We sliced off the ICP's head and moved on to the next. It didn't take us long, especially since the ICPs never seemed to learn to dodge and the swords could block incoming disks.

* * *

Unfortunately, the ICPs weren't hiding anything special. There was an archive bin containing a subroutine allowing for higher jumping, but we already had one of those. There was also an old email from Lightfoot to the Executives describing how they were almost ready to begin fusing the Mobian and AI elements together into their experiment. We spent some time reading the messages, and then turned to leave to find an ICP standing behind us. We immediately pulled our disk, ready to derez it.

"Wait Composite, there is something I must tell you.," the program told me. Upon closer inspection we noticed that it wasn't an ICP, just a civilian who thought it had something to say.

 _How does it know our name?_ "Speak."

"I was instructed to tell you to connect to the I/O node grid. I don't know by whom, and I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't get real trustworthy vibes from the user who gave me the task. She wouldn't even give me her name." the program told me. He turned and walked away.

Our curiosity was peaked. _Who would want to talk to us except Lightfoot?_ We wandered over in the direction of the nearest I/O node.

" _Connecting to I/O Node grid"_ announced the voice of the Switchboard _"Please state your name"_

We hesitated a moment before saying, "Composite, Our name is Composite."

" _Composite, you have one incoming voice and video communication request. Would you like to answer?"_ the Switchboard asked.

"We accept the connection." _Why else would we connect?_

" _Establishing connection"_ the Switchboard announced. The Node's display changed from a picture of a red-horned telephone[1] to a picture of some sort of wetware program with a wetware animal-like purple snout and blue head. Then it hit us, this was our biological components. _But how? We only have one mind, our wetware and software components don't have separate minds!_

"Hello Composite, My name is Camanion," the Mobian program spoke with a chipper, somewhat happy sounding voice. "You have probably recognized me as your biological element by now. FCon obtained my DNA using some sort of inter-dimensional networking link when they sliced into my doctor's office network." The camera was so high resolution that we could see that the retinas at the back of Camanion's eyes were a dirty gray instead of the normal Mobian blue, indicating some sort of natural damage. "The doctors have my DNA so they can research a rare genetic defect that can potentially cause blindness. My vision has been on the way out since I was seven, thirteen years ago."

"Yes, we noticed that your retinas were the wrong color for a Mobian," we commented. Camanion looked slightly surprised by our voice and the use of plural pronouns, but not particularly fazed. "But anyway, that only explains our wetware components. How does this explain our software components., and how are you talking to us from a different dimension?"

"Simple! At the same time they were cracking my doctor's office, they were also cracking my personal network. They installed a small program to keep the link open. I copied and reverse-engineered the code so I could open a communications channel. Unfortunately, there is only enough bandwidth for audio/video communications and transfer of small-to-medium files. Their link is much broader, but I haven't gotten access through it yet. As for your software side..." The I/O Node display split in half and another program appeared on the other half. This program was humanoid, with armor like ours without the circuit patterns, and we couldn't see the tips of sword handles poking above its shoulders, nor could we see a tail waving randomly like ours. This program also had no helmet, revealing a wetware like face with a curtain of darkish yellow fiber strands running from the top of the head across the shoulders. But the armor and build were identical…

"Composite, meet Risa, your software source. Risa, meat Composite, our enhanced clone." Camanion told us

"Composite, huh? Not very original, but what can you expect? She was made by humans," Risa commented

" _We_ would prefer to be referred to in plural pronouns, thank you made-by-a-Mobian," we responded in an irritated tone.

"Gosh you two, don't be so speciesist! Risa, both of your human friends are quite creative, and Composite, have you already forgotten that you are half Mobian?" Camanion intervened.

" _They_ , if they insist, are a clone. I am the original. I am superior. We are superior." Risa said in a haughty tone.

"Actually, if you look at pure combat power and potential, they are far superior to us," Camanion said, "I mean, you have your Blaster, but you still haven't gotten it to a state where you can use it safely, and all I have for combat is this," Camanion said, reaching behind her back and pulling out what looked like half a rod primitive, "My overvoltage cattle prod, the iconic weapon of the network administrator."

"You say that isn't powerful? As far as we know, the PRod is a rather powerful weapon, even if it does use a significant amount of energy." we commented

"The cattle prod is not nearly as powerful as a PRod. Speaking of which, I do have enough bandwidth to accept a file of that size, and my 3D printer is ready to roll. Any chance you could…?" Camanion asked.

"Yes and no," we responded. "We could send you one, and it would print just fine, but it only runs on the energy of a program. Wetware programs can't recharge themselves as easily as software and hardware."

"Don't worry about that, I'll burn that bridge when I get to it, or is that cross? I never could tell the difference," Camanion said with a grin that probably would have made us nervous if we were wetware.

Just then something in our memory clicked. "It was you, the one who told us to use the music earlier, wasn't it?" we inquired.

"Not exactly, Risa?" Camanion asked, as her camera zoomed back so we could see her in her entirety, and an object about twice as tall. Risa on her screen nodded, and exploded into blue data cubes, which then dissolved into the background… and reformed next to Camanion. We were quite surprised to see this, as we had believed that we were the only entity with the ability to enter and leave the Cyberworld at will. Risa was a little under twice as tall as Camanion, as she had a human build. Camanion had a small computer strapped to her arm, which chattered about controls under Camanion's finger while she deftly operated it without looking away from the camera. After about five seconds, the computer started to glow, and Camanion and Risa both shouted "Merge!" in unison. There was a flash of light and when it cleared, Risa was not visible, but Camanion was wearing Risa's armor.

"In this form, we are known as N3tmaster. Unlike you, we do have separate minds for Camanion and Risa. Camanion is mostly in charge, but Risa can control some elements," the new program said in a voice that was similar, but not identical to ours. The same voice that told us to use music to enhance our combat efficiency. N3tmaster pulled a USB device from their left arm and plugged it into a computer off-camera, probably the one the camera was connected to. Then they exploded into blue data cubes and reformed on Risa's side of the I/O node display. "We are too large to send to you safely, but we can instruct you on some of your abilities," With that, there was another flash of light and Risa and Camanion returned to their original positions. We noticed a few data cubes flowing into Camanin's wrist computer from off-camera in the direction she had plugged in the USB device.

* * *

"You have already discovered the ability to travel in and out of computers at will," Risa commented, "And you have discovered the ability to download files into yourself. If what I know of FCon is correct, they probably attempted to perfect my Blaster technology," at this, we activated our shotgun. "Ah, an HECU SPAS-12. Not what I would have expected, but it should work fine," Risa's right arm morphed into a gun of some sort, but it wasn't nearly as detailed as ours. "You also appear to have many abilities from the Game Grid, I cannot help you with these abilities, though I would suggest you find yourself a Rod Primitive and master the Light Cycle. I wish I had one of those, because Armagetron Advanced [2] is good enough most of the time, but sometimes I want to know what it's like to actually take the controls. You should probably also work on finding more music you can use in combat. The songs you use now are great in the situations you have encountered, but they may not help you in other scenarios. As for your Mobian abilities, I can't help you. Talk to Camanion about those."

"There are many abilities that different Mobians can have. I have more than most, but there are quite a few I don't have, or that I've never gotten a chance to use. The best examples are I can't fly like many Mobian foxes with two tails, but I also have some very rare abilities." As Camanion said this, a whirlwind of slightly glowing objects ranging from flash drives, an assortment of cords and battery packs, and at least three 3.5 inch floppy diskettes started swirling behind her. Camanion had adjusted her camera so that I could see the wetware from chest up, including her "Talk Nerdy to Me" T-shirt. "I can teach you telekinesis, you basically just focus on what you want to move and where you want it to go, try it on those two ICPs behind you."

"What?" We whirled around, and quickly pulled out our disk to block an incoming attack. When the next attack came, we quickly focused on the disk, willing it to stop. The disk moved to the side and missed us. _Close enough, Now…_ We made the disk orbit around us before returning… To the wrong ICP, who promptly derezed with a yell. _Blast!_ We started up a new song _What Im Made Of-Crush40_. We then told the other ICP "Let's see what you can do!" and grabbed him in our mind's grasp. He started to whirl around the chamber, eventually slamming into the next ICP around the corner so hard they both derezed.

"What was that?" We heard a third ICP ask in a bewildered tone.

 _Incompetent Confused Programs can burn for all we care!_ We thought, morphing our arm into its shotgun form and skidded around the corner, blasting to the beat of our music. We then returned to the I/O Node to find Camanion was still sitting there, waiting for our return.

"Oh, and there's one other ability I should tell you about..."

* * *

We discovered an exit port, which took us about three servers over to a machine containing militarized projects other than us. In one chamber, we discovered a small output port to the real world. The display screen indicated that nobody was on the other side, so we transferred to the real world.

We immediately encountered a hardware program about two feet tall, with four spindly legs and a slightly helmet shaped head. It immediately turned around and attacked us using some sort of high speed ballistic weapon. We hit it with a single blast from our shotgun, and in a one in a million chance, a pellet managed to jam its gun barrel. We copied its schematics, and then used some of our energy to rez in a new unit. We programmed the new unit to target a program we indicated with a "Finger gun." We found an odd sound file in the code of a male human saying "Marine, if you run across any operational Sentry Bots, use them. Those guys pack a lot of firepower." We could confirm this, as the three hits the first program had made on us had done a significant amount of damage. Luckily for us, there was a red patch routine inside the input port of the computer we immediately reentered.

* * *

 **Lightfoot's POV (3** **rd** **)**

"The project has escaped? Find it at once! Bring it back, dead or alive," a dark figure on a screen told Lightfoot. "Use everything at your disposal, I want that program found!"

* * *

 **Composite's POV (1** **st** **)**

We entered a chamber with a black floor with white lines in a grid pattern when a motorized vehicle of some sort zoomed past us, leaving a green wall behind it. A moment later, the vehicle turned in a pair of 90 degree angles and stopped in front of us, quickly collapsing into a rod primitive held by a blue program.

"Hello program, You really shouldn't be on the Grid without a Light Cycle, Here's one I've been keeping for a rainy day. Catch!" with this, the program threw us a second rod primitive. We activated the Rod, which expanded into a longer than normal Cycle, which had no canopy and some components could be seen through the extended chassis. We were sitting hunched over on the saddle, with our hands on the rod. "I'm running this grid in practice mode, so we can ride safely. If you hit a jetwall, you'll just loose a point instead of derezing. So start your Cycle!" The program had teleported to the other side of the grid, and had his cycle active. He was talking to us over the communications system.

We pressed the conveniently labeled On button and our Light Cycle blasted forward, leaving a blue jetwall behind. The other program accelerated at the same time, zooming forward, but slower. "I gave you a Super Light Cycle, I use a regular model because the Super model moves faster and turns differently then what I'm used to." We accelerated, and gave the Rod a jerk to the left, causing the Cycle to turn 90 degrees left, decelerating in the process, but quickly coming back up to speed. We slammed through a spinning shield icon.

" _Shield Break Acquired,"_ a voice announced, and we noticed a shield icon on our console. We also noticed that the green Jetwall was right in front of us. We pressed a button on the console and a glowing shield enveloped our Cycle, before immediately dissipating upon contact with the Jetwall. Our cycle blasted through without incident. We drove in an irregular pattern.

 _This is what we were rezed to do!_ We thought happily, racing around and boxing the other program in and slamming him into his own Jetwall.

He deactivated his Cycle and we did the same, meeting in the middle of the grid. "You're good, I've never seen anyone do that before. What's your name?" the other program asked

"We are Composite. We have put our purpose behind us." we told the other program, who stiffened.

"Composite? I must report this..." The program stared blankly for a second, and then four Seekers thrust out of the ground. We loaded up a new song and rezed in our Sentry bot, targeting it on the first Seeker. The program's circuits changed from blue to purple, and it morphed into an ICP, reeving new data to its Disk. We dispatched it quickly, and moved to helping our bot derez one of the Seekers. We then told it to attack the next while we went after the third. Unfortunately, the fourth Seeker landed a hit on us, sending us flying. We landed hard, taking a significant amount of damage. We winced, and stood up in time to be grabbed by one of the two remaining Seekers, the third having been derezed during our impromptu flight lesson. We instinctively started to blast our music through our helmet modulator and sing in a voice that was the stuff of nightmares "CAN'T HOLD ON MUCH LONGER… BUT I WILL NEVER GIVE UP!" The last two seekers and the bot derezed under the auditory assault. We immediately decided to call this attack "Banshee Wail."

As soon as we hit the ground, eight more Seekers emerged, ready to bring us in. We got ready to fight, but suddenly felt a wellspring of power open up inside us. In response, we shouted "CHAOS… CONTROL!" and vanished in a flash of light

 **So, how was that? Took me much longer to write this, and I will definitely try to keep them at closer to this length in the future. A few footnotes, I've got a favorite for the first person who can tell me where the red-horned telephone comes from. The abbreviation will be good enough, as the full length is somewhat profane. The same goes for the origin of Composite's Sentry Bot. As for footnote 2, Armagetron Advanced is a very real game. Check it out! The dark figure talking to Lightfoot? Spoiler alert, but he's not actually very important. At least I don't think so. I do know that the figure is the CEO of FCon, who's identity was never revealed in Tron 2.0. Where do you think Composite went? I know it's somewhere you'll never guess unless you already know, because it's about as far from the action-packed worlds of Sonic and Tron as it gets. Feel free to speculate. If you manage to figure it out, I'll tell you. You'll have to wait to find out though! I actually did change up the line in which Camanion tells Composite how to use telekinesis a bit, here's the original.**

"I also have accessed Chaos Control once, darn near warped myself cross-country. I don't know how I did it without a Chaos Emerald, and I've never been able to do it again. I can help you with telekinesis though, you basically just focus on what you want to move and where you want it to go. Try it on those two ICPs behind you."

 **And after that, it's the same except that Composite doesn't go back to the I/O Node to talk with Camanion some more.**


	3. Arrival

**Hello, I'm excited to write this up because now we're getting somewhere.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review, which is still only appearing in my email. I never actually thought of that as giving Composite a tutorial, but that does make sense. I'll bet all of the readers guessed that Camanion's "one more ability" was Chaos Control, just as I'll bet nobody (unless you had insider information) would guess where Composite went. I really wanted to get Risa and Camanion introduced as soon as possible, so I found a way to put them in. They won't be reappearing for a while, but I just wanted to throw them out there. Incidentally, Risa was my first OC, though not in her current form, in fact Risa was originally a human who only had the ability to resist mind control and hive mind assimilation. All of her stories have been lost over the past four or five years, and were too abysmal to upload anyway. So, on that note, Buckle up, it's storytime (Got that one from the Escape Pod podcast, always wanted to say it.)**

Chapter 3: Arrival

 _Scene: A beautiful meadow, with flowers and insects. A man wearing thick glasses stands in the center of the meadow, writing in a notebook. Suddenly, a crackling ball of energy appears about a hundred yards away, writhing and flashing for about five seconds. A bright flash emerges from the center and the ball is replaced by a figure. The figure is humanoid with a tail, wearing seamless but not form fitting red armor with blue circuit patterns. The figure has a pair of swords and a Disk. The figure falls limply to the ground, unconscious or dead. The man calmly pulls out a device and presses a few controls. He then speaks into the device._ "Yeesha, I think I may have found something interesting."

* * *

Yeesha's POV

Yeesha was sitting in her house, Writing when a call on her Ki distracted her. _Maybe if I ignore it, whoever it is will stop calling and I can go back to work._ Of course, this didn't work. It never worked for the de facto leader of the D'ni after her father Atrus died of old age. Sighing and setting her pen down after finishing the symbol she was working on, she answered the call. _"Yeesha, I think I may have found something interesting,"_ came the voice of Irras from his Age of Rainder.

"What have you found?" Yeesha asked.

" _I_ _'_ _m not sure, it looks like a person, maybe D_ _'_ _ni or human, except that he has a tail, but I can_ _'_ _t tell for certain. He_ _'_ _s wearing some kind of armor and I can_ _'_ _t see how to remove it."_ Irras answered.

"I'll be right there" Yeesha said, and Linked.

* * *

Yeesha appeared next to Irras, startling him. "I can never get used to that," he commented, "Linking without a Book, it's not natural!" Yeesha and Irras laughed at the old joke, and then Yeesha put back on a straight face.

"So, where is he."

"Over there," Irras pointed towards the armored figure. "There was a ball of energy, and then he just fell out. That's all I can say. He's been unconscious ever since." Irras told her.

Yeesha felt a stirring of the old excitement, the wish for adventure. "Take him to my place, he can have the guest room. I'll go ahead and get it ready." with that, Yeesha Linked back to her home on Releeshahn, immediately getting it ready to receive a guest. Nothing had taken her attention so completely since her nearly abortive quest to free the Bahro.

* * *

The armored stranger certainly was an odd one. While Yeesha and any other D'ni could see a red armored humanoid with blue circuit patterns over the armor, their best medical sensors could only find an animal similar to an Earth fox in a life support system curled up in the center around chest level, and a strange energy reading around the rest of the figure. It was also strange that the figure had been breathing normally for about an hour after transport to Releeshahn, but he had stopped and now only breathed about once an hour. How the being stayed alive was beyond Yeesha. None of the D'ni could figure out how the figure hadn't needed to eat or drink for all this time either. As Yeesha was wondering this, Anna, daughter of Marrim and one of Yeesha's oldest friends hurried from the guest chamber.

"He is stirring."

* * *

 **Composite's POV**

STATUS REPORT  
PROCESSORS 1-4: ONLINE  
RAM: ONLINE  
MEMORY STORAGE MODULES 1-5: ONLINE  
6-10: ONLINE  
ALL PRIMARY SYSTEMS ONLINE  
AUXILIARY SUBROUTINE REPORT  
DISK: ONLINE  
AUXILIARY WEAPON COPY MODULE: ONLINE  
AUTONOMOUS WEAPON REZ-IN: ONLINE  
MELEE WEAPONS: OFFLINE, DISCONNECTED  
MORPH: ONLINE  
SENSORS REPORT  
AUDITORY SENSORS: ONLINE  
OLFACTORY SENSORS: ONLINE  
INTERNAL SCANNERS: ONLINE  
VISUAL SENSORS: ONLINE  
TEXTURE SENSORS: ONLINE  
MOTION REPORT: ALL MOTION CAPABILITIES ONLINE  
NO NEARBY COMPUTERS  
MELEE WEAPONS ARE 10 FEET AWAY AT APPROX 90 DEGREES  
ALL SYSTEMS ONLINE  
ENERGY RESERVES AT 84%  
NO DAMAGE DETECTED  
STATUS REPORT COMPLETE

Our visual sensors snapped open with another odd sliding motion. We were lying on our back on a soft surface. We sat up, and immediately grabbed our head in pain.

"Don't try to sit up, you've been unconscious for at least a week," a female voice said off to our right. We whirled around, and then winced at another bolt of pain in our head. The voice was that of a young wetware program. She had a look of mixed concern and curiosity, "You appeared in a ball of energy in the Age of one of my students. What happened?"

"Chaos Control. The last thing we remember was being surrounded by Seekers. We used Chaos Control to escape. We don't remember anything past that." We said, "Where are we, what do you mean by Age?"

The program raised an eyebrow at our use of plural pronouns, but had no other reaction, "An Age is a world that a D'ni travels to through a Linking Book. My name is Yeesha, what is yours?"

"We are known as Composite by our creators. We go by the name because we haven't come up with anything better. The name suits us," we stated calmly.

"So, you speak English. I'm sorry if I misspeak some things. I haven't spoken English in many years. My people, the D'ni usually speak our own language. My parents taught me English so I could communicate with others dwelling on the surface of Earth."

"Earth... One of the many Earths is our home world. We didn't like it that much." we stated, "Our creators wanted to use us for world domination. We didn't agree with this purpose. Now, we have no purpose." we told the wetware program, Yeesha.

"If you have no purpose, what do you live for?" Yeesha asked, "No, that didn't come out the way I wanted it to... If you have no purpose, than why do you continue your... no that doesn't sound right either."

"We wish to find a purpose. It is in the nature of sentience for an intelligence to wish to continue its own existence. Intelligence is its own reason. Besides, we don't know all of our abilities. Maybe if we knew more of them, we'd be able to use them to find a purpose." we told Yeesha. "Are you the only one of your kind?"

"Of course not. There are many D'ni living on Releeshahn. Not as many as there were in the old D'ni Caverns, but there are plenty of us still around. My father Atrus made it his life's work to rebuild the D'ni civilization after the Empire of a Thousand Worlds fell to greed and corruption. Only a handful survived the plague that swept through the caverns, or the death carts of Veovis and the Philosopher, A'Gaeris." Yeesha told us, explaining some of the history of her people. "That was almost two hundred fifty years ago Earth time. It was seventy years until Atrus started to rebuild the cavern, before deciding to Write Releeshahn as a new home-How are you doing that?"

We looked around the room while Yeesha was talking. It was a simple wooden room, with brown, unpainted walls, floor and roof with visible rafters. Above the bed was a painting of a distinguished looking old man. _Atrus?_ we wondered. To the right of the sleeping platform, _Bed_ we remembered reading in one of Lightfoot's reports, we saw our swords in their scabbards. We focused on them, and they started to glow slightly. We willed them to come to us and strapped them to our back. Yeesha looked surprised at this.

"Telekinesis," we told her, "It's an innate ability that some members of our biological species have. It is exceptionally rare. Our biological source says she is the only one she has personally met with this ability, but she has heard unconfirmed rumors of another who makes odd claims about the future. She has never met him, but she does believe he exists."

"You say biological source, do you mean mother?" Yeesha asked.

"No, template would be more accurate. We are more a clone than a daughter. Camanion is a Mobian fox."

"Fascinating, Our best medical scanners only detected a fox-like animal in a life-support system in your chest area, and the rest of you appeared as an odd energy reading."

"Yes, we are half Mobian fox, half sentient artificial intelligence program. We are a Composite, hence our name." we announced.

Suddenly a male wetware program ran into the room with a slightly frantic look about him. "Yeesha, the beast has returned!"

"The beast?" we asked, automatically redirecting power to combat systems, "What beast?"

Yeesha looked grim, "A large carnivorous animal brought here by a hunter. All but one was killed by him, but the last one killed him. Which is probably good for him. We'd have trapped him in a specially written prison Age for the rest of his natural life for bringing in such a dangerous animal."

"Animal... How intelligent is it?" we asked.

"Not very, it fights entirely on instinct. It attacks, does as much damage as it can, and only leaves when it's hurt." the male program explained

"So it's a bit-like then, No problem!" we said happily, jumping out of the bed... and promptly collapsing on the floor. "Or maybe not. We aren't as recovered as we thought."

"A bit -like...? No time, explain later" Yeesha said, "Now you get back in bed before you hurt yourself."

* * *

 **Yeesha's POV**

"But we can still help," Composite told Yeesha.

"Just stay in bed," Yeesha said firmly. Composite climbed back into the bed, arranging their tail in a more comfortable position, and suddenly, red cubes started to form next to the bed, forming a robot with four legs and a helmet-like head.

"Take our Sentry Bot with you," Composite told Yeesha, then told the robot "Follow Yeesha's instructions. Yeesha is the female wetware," They then turned back to Yeesha and told her "It will follow you, shoot the Bit with a finger gun, and it will attack the Bit. It packs one heck of a punch. We know two Seekers that can attribute to that fact, or they could if it hadn't Derezed them." Composite was breathing at a slightly elevated rate, but nothing that worried Yeesha. "When it runs out of energy, it'll automatically Derez. Don't get between it and the Bit if you want to survive."

"Okay, Irras, Bot, let's go." Irras nodded and the bot chirped in response and started making its noisy way to the door. "It's a little loud..." Yeesha mused

"It doesn't need to be stealthy," Composite stated from the bed. "By the time it gets close enough to be heard, it's already in range."

Irras nodded and ran into the next room, stopping at the safe to open it and grab a gun. Yeesha quickly followed suit, closing the safe behind her. She didn't like guns, ,they were a distasteful weapon. Not that combat was a good thing, but she preferred to fight face to face, where she was forced to look the enemy in the eye and decide what to do. But she'd make an exception for this situation.

The bot followed them outside where the beast was attacking a house it had taken offense at for no apparent reason. "There's your target," Yeesha said to the bot, which sat there "looking" at her. Yeesha then remembered what Composite told her and shot a finger gun at the beast. The bot immediately turned and opened fire at the animal. The animal turned, yowling, towards the robot, which merely stayed put, firing. The beast, which looked like a forest green lion the size of a barn, started towards the robot, which backed up just as quickly, keeping a steady distance as the big cat advanced, still firing. The cat pushed the robot out of the town into the surrounding woods. Eventually the robot ran out of energy and exploded into red cubes, which moved faster than the eye could see into Yeesha's house, returning to their source.

* * *

 **Composite's POV**

Yeesha returned with Irras a few minutes after the remains of the Bot. "The beast has left, The robot distracted it and lured it out into the forest, where it promptly lost interest in the town."

"We know, we saw through its sensors," we commented "We don't want to ask, but do you have any water? It's the best way we've simulated to restore our energy outside of the Cyberworlds we call home."

Irras left the room and returned a moment later with a glass of water. We retracted our visor to reveal our purple-muzzled blue face. Yeesha raised an eyebrow and Irras jumped a little, sloshing but not spilling the water.

"I must admit, I expected a more human face, but it's not a problem." Yeesha commented while Irras handed us the glass. Our circuits glowed brightly as we drank, refilling our energy.

"Thanks, Rezing in a Sentry Bot usually doesn't take that much energy, but our energy reserves aren't very strong at the moment." we commented, attempting to get out of the bed and succeeding in standing up. We did lean pretty heavily on the foot of the bed, but we were at least on our own two feet. "So, we are curious, what is this Age we arrived in? We started off towards the door, rapidly regaining strength as our energy moved back to movement subsystems.

"Rainder is Irras's Age," Yeesha said

"Okay, Let's go," Irras said at the same time. We heard him murmur to Yeesha, "What were you thinking? That was too close to what happened to your great-grandmother. That was a little too significant in the Fall."

"I was just thinking you might not like to allow and outsider onto your Age," Yeesha responded, just as quietly.

"I think they've already crossed that bridge, and I wouldn't refuse at any rate," Irras spoke back.

"We can hear you," we commented. "So, where are we going?"

"Straight out the front door and three houses down," Irras told us. We walked out the front door, remembering the layout from watching the security bot follow Yeesha and Irras to fight the beast earlier. As usual, Yeesha didn't seem surprised at this, and Irras had only slightly more of a reaction. We had the feeling that Yeesha at some time in her past had been forced to do and see things that a wetware program of her age shouldn't have had to do.

We walked to Irras's house and waited for him to open the door. His house was decorated in a less utilitarian fashion than Yeesha's, but was still far cleaner than what we saw of Camanion's home through the I/O Node grid, especially after her… energetic demonstration of telekinesis. Irras lead us to a room just off the main chamber containing nothing but a pedestal with a book on it. The book was open to the first page, which was blank except for a… window, that was the best word to describe it. A window to another dimension.

"So that's it," Irras said, "A _Kormahn_ , or Descriptive Book," Irras told us, "It is the Book that establishes the first Link to an Age. It is called a Descriptive Book because it contains a very accurate description of the resulting Age. No two Descriptive Books link to the exact same Age, to do so would require an _exact_ duplicate down to the molecular level, even down to the subatomic level. Obviously, this is impossible by all D'ni and human laws of science. A word of warning, a Descriptive book is a one way pass, it doesn't go both ways. You have to have a _Korvahkh_ , a Linking Book to return. Linking books all have identical writing, except for some special versions, and can be mass-produced as long as your writing hand doesn't get tired." At this, he grinned and opened his right hand a few times.

Yeesha took over from this point. "Linking books return you to the exact location they were written in. This can lead to problems if the Descriptive book is modified or damaged. The Linking books or that age will still link to the unmodified version of the Age, not the new Link," she told us. "The two major limitations of Linking Books are this. A Linking Book does not follow the user and it is impossible to link from one part of an Age to another."

"So, you going to go through?" Irras asked excitedly, bouncing with the energy usually associated with a small child during a major holiday or someone who was in desperate need of a trip to the sanitation facilities.

"How? We were unconscious the last time we Linked," we reminded him.

* * *

"Just put your hand on the panel." Yeesha told us. We obligingly put our hand on the panel of the right page. Our hand seemed to tingle for a moment, before we seemed to lurch into the panel. It almost seemed as if we had been fused with the ink and paper, and then as suddenly as it had begun, we were back in our own body, except for the small detail that we were in a cave, not the Book Room. We stepped out of the way in time for Irras to Link through behind us.

"Yeesha will meet us in the meadow," Irras told us. He opened a hidden panel in the cave wall and withdrew a small book. Opening the book, he checked that it wasn't damaged, and then replaced it in the small chamber and closed the panel. He walked to the mouth of the cave, with us following behind.

We stepped out of the cave into bright sunlight. Irras squinted and put on a thick pair of glasses. He then walked out across a field into a flower-filled meadow. We saw Yeesha in the middle of the meadow, examining what looked like an insect of some sort. "How did a wetware program get out here so much faster than us?" we wondered out loud.

"Yeesha is the Grower, the one who was instrumental in freeing the Bahro from their enslavement to the D'ni, allowing us to finally settle in Releeshahn. Yeesha can Link without the need for a Book, though she can't Link from one part of an Age to another. She can, however, write Books that serve this function. She can also write Books that follow the user."

"Hmm... We'll have to learn that ability," we mused.

"Only the Grower can use that ability," Irras told us.

"We have our ways," we said mysteriously.

"Welcome to Rainder, an age of nature," Yeesha told us, "The only artificial structures on Rainder are the Linking cave and the tent Irras carries on overnight trips."

"It's my first Age, I wanted to make it special," Irras told us, "The descriptive book is very short. I basically just ensured it was safe, stable, and had no artificial structures."

"It is the shortest stable Age I've found. It is quite effective at what it is designed to do," Yeesha commented

"Stable?" we asked.

"Ages with a lot of contradictions, or not enough framework, tend to be unstable. They can collapse eventually. Sometimes, an Age is deliberately destabilized as a trap. One of the D'ni's greatest Ages was desecrated during the Fall." Yeesha responded.

"We have heard you mention the Fall before, what happened?" we asked.

* * *

"It started almost three hundred years ago. The D'ni lived in caverns under a part of Earth that is now known as New Mexico. We attempted to create a tunnel to the surface to communicate and trade with the people of the Surface. The Council of Elders decided to abandon the plan after the Great Shaft was dug and then heavily damaged by a major earthquake. The tunnel was completed, sealed, and forgotten." Yeesha explained, "Fifty years later, a woman of the surface, Anna discovered the tunnels by accident while exploring with her father. He died of natural causes and she continued the exploration alone. She found a hole in the Seal, and continued into the main tunnel system. She was intercepted and captured by the City Guard. She was imprisoned on a small island in the Great Lake. There, the Guild of Linguists attempted to learn her language, English. She turned the tables on them and learned D'ni."

Irras continued, "After a series of hearings, it was decided that Anna would live with the leader of the Guild of Surveyors, the Guild responsible for the creation of the expedition to the Surface, and his son Aitrus. Aitrus secretly taught her about Books and Ages, and just as secretly taught himself to Write. Of course, nothing was wrong with writing, nearly all of the D'ni were literate, but only the Guild of Writers were allowed to Write Ages. Aitrus Wrote an Age for the two of them to explore. It was a very well-Written Age, very stable, but it has unfortunately been lost to time. But I'm getting ahead of myself."

Yeesha continued the story, "Anna and Aitrus eventually fell inn love and married. Unfortunately, this lost Aitrus the friendship of Veovis. Veovis was a member of the Guild of Writers, and held just as much sway in the Council as Aitrus. They were good friends for many years, but Veovis was a believer in the superiority of the D'ni people. Veovis owed Aitrus a major favor when Aitrus rescued him during the earthquake fifty years earlier. Aitrus used this favor to have Veovis answer yes to the law allowing a D'ni to marry a non-D'ni, creating the unanimous vote required for such a major decision. Anna, who took the D'ni name Ti'ana, Storyteller, and Aitrus eventually had a son, my grandfather, Ghen. Ghen isn't very important in the story for a long time. When Ghen was about three, Veovis worked with banished council member A'Gaeris. A'Gaeris told Veovis that he wanted to remove the corruption of the government, but he really just wanted to destroy it."

Irras continued, "Veovis was eventually arrested, tried and convicted of dealing in illegal Ages. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a Prison Age. He escaped with A'Gaeris's help and disappeared for six months. He then became a rabble-rouser, starting a major riot, the biggest, and last, in D'ni history. He was given the unprecedented sentence of execution, to be carried out on the highest steps of the Great Library. Ti'ana found a notebook belonging to Veovis, telling of his intentions to restore D'ni to its former glory. She convinced the Council to try Life Imprisonment one more time. A special Prison Age was written. Five people, four Writers and one editor worked to write it. Veovis was sent to the Age. A'Gaeris secretly followed by Linking from a sort of nexus age written by them, not The Nexus, but a nexus, and immediately linking into the Prison age with a Book to D'ni. The Prison Book was burnt, and it was believed that Veovis would be a problem no longer. Six weeks later..."

Yeesha finished the tale, almost choking up at the end, "... A Plague, created by the pair swept through the great Cavern. Many people escaped to Ages, which the plague couldn't get to. A'Gaeris and Veovis, however, piled dead bodies onto carts and sent one to each Age they found. All they found but one. That was the one that Aitrus and Ti'ana had written. In the end, Veovis couldn't make himself do it. Of the thousands of Ages, only about seven hundred survived, and only about a dozen were inhabited. We almost died as a species. Aitrus, who was infected and dying, took the Book containing the Age he had written, where Ti'ana and Ghen were, He then Linked to it and back to D'ni. He discovered the dying body of Veovis, who had been betrayed and stabbed by A'Gaeris. Veovis gave Aitrus a Book to their Nexus. Aitrus went to the Descriptive book and destabilized it. He then tricked A'Gaeris into following him into the now unstable Age. Neither of them came out alive. The Book containing Aitrus's Age, which we call the Age of Aitrus because even it's name is lost, has not been found."

* * *

We listened to the story. After we heard it all, we held a respectful silence before asking "Can we learn? Can we learn to Write?"

Yeesha smiled, eager to teach a new student, "Yes you can learn. I'd be happy to teach you."

 **And that's that! How was it? I'll bet you've never heard of the Myst series. All of that back story at the end? That is completely cannon. I basically just summarized the events of** **Myst: The Book of Ti'ana** **in one of my trademark info dumps. The part where Composite describes Linking was a paraphrase of page 447 of The Myst Reader, which was a compilation of all three novels. And yes, the Cleft is in New Mexico, the camels and other hints in the novels that the cleft was in the middle east were deliberate misinformation. Myst was a series that was wildly popular in the mid '90s, but fell in popularity after the second game, which was the second best-selling software title of 1995, second only to Windows 95 itself. Myst was the best selling PC game of all time until The Sims beat it. In the early 90s, Myst was the reason you bought a computer with a CD drive, and Riven was the reason you bought Windows 95. You played it, your entire family played it, and your cat clicked the mouse while your back was turned. I still have the original Windows 3.1/95 version of Myst from 1994 and the 1995 5 CD release of Riven. The third major game in the series, Uru: Ages beyond Myst (Myst 3 and 4 weren't actually all that important to the plot) was an ambitious project to create a game that was half single player, half Pre-World of Warcraft MMO. It bombed spectacularly, nearly bankrupting the company. The online components are now Free-to-play as Myst Online: Uru Live Again and the single player Uru: Complete Collection is on Steam for ten or fifteen dollars, and nearly all of Cyan's games (see my profile for the ones that aren't,) are on Steam for about thirty dollars. They're worth the money. You know how they say the mark of the insanely hardcore Star Trek fan is they can speak Klingon? The mark of a truly hardcore Myst fan is they can read and write in D'ni (I can only count in D'ni, because I'm a Riven player.) There was a running joke that Cyan would always include some intentional mistakes in their use of the D'ni language for fans to flame about. As for the chapter, How was it? I didn't add any OCs in this chapter except maybe Irras, who is named after and has an identical personality to a character from one of the novels. I only say he may be an OC because there is no way the original could have survived this long, and the original Irras wasn't D'ni. Anna, daughter of Marrim is not the same as Ti'ana, and was only mentioned in the epilogue of the final novel, but she seems older than Yeesha because the D'ni live much longer, though I took a bit of creative license and made Anna's species longer lived than humans so I could have her as a cameo. And what was the Morph on the status report? How will Composite Link without a book if only the Grower can use this ability? That's for me to know and you to find out! Or you could just read my profile, where I explain all of my OC's personalities and abilities. Either way, Composite will be learning to Write in the next few chapters. Until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**


	4. Learning the Language

**Hello readers, I wanted to write a little more and get a new chapter up as soon as possible. This one will probably be a bit shorter. I won't know until I finish. I'm having a bit of a writer's block problem at the moment. Combine that with a lot of stuff in the real world, and writing becomes very difficult very fast.**

 **Thanks as always to FourthWallBreaker for the review, which is finally showing up in the review list along with the first two. I'm glad you may be interested in the Myst series. One thing I've noticed is that ironically enough, watching YouTube Lets Plays and actually playing the games are two of the worst possible ways to get the lore of the series. Really the best ways are wiki reading and going to a GameFAQs type site and reading notebooks from the games. That's where the most important stuff is, and if you read it online you don't have to deal with Atrus's handwriting.**

 **Once I get around to learning to write D'ni, I'll possibly put some sort of code in the beginnings for laughs and to give interesting facts that don't actually have any relevance. Just something I may do for the heck of it.**

Chapter 4: Learning the Language

 **Composite's POV**

"So the first and most important lesson of Age Writing is that you do not _create_ the Ages you Write. When you first Link to a new Age, the Book finds an Age on the Great Tree of Possibility that most closely matches your description. Even unstable Ages already exist before you Link to them." Yeesha told us. We were in her study, which was a lot messier than the rest of the house, with an assortment of Books, notebooks, and loose papers haphazardly scattered around several desks.

We were taking a few hours a day with Yeesha learning to write the common D'ni language before moving on to the special version used when Writing Ages. A significant amount of the rest of our time was spent teaching Yeesha about our world and technology. It had all started a few days before.

* * *

 **Begin Flashback**

We were in Yeesha's guest chamber, simply talking about the major differences in our worlds. "…So Ages and Linking are instrumental parts of D'ni society." Yeesha finished

"Irras mentioned that you were 'The Grower,' what does that mean?" We asked.

"The Grower was a person in D'ni mythology destined to free the Bahro. The Bahro are a species of semi-metaphysical beings who lived in the D'ni caverns long before the D'ni took up residence. They have a somewhat reptilian appearance, and are capable of doing many things only they can do. They can Link at will, even between different parts of the same Age, and they have been known to affect the flow of time and even change the season of individual Ages. I only call them the Bahro because I don't know what they call themselves. In fact, the closest English translation of Bahro is 'Beast People,' Needless to say, they don't like the name, but they refuse to give me anything else to call them." Yeesha explained to us.

"But what is the Grower?" we asked.

"I'm getting to that. People call me the Grower, but the strange thing is, I'm technically not, even though I have all the abilities attributed to the Grower. I have lived much longer than a person with as little D'ni blood as I should be able to, I can Link without a book, though I can't Link from one part of an Age to another. I have also Written an Age, Relto, and Books with unique properties. Relto Books can Link from one part of the Age to another, they do follow the user, and each Relto book, I don't know how many there are, Link to nearly identical, but separate Ages." Yeesha continued on, "I first found out I had the abilities of the Grower when I traveled to the D'ni caverns, like my grandfather Ghen before me. I found a mentor in a D'ni named Calob. I believed he was the Grower until he was murdered. I tracked down his murderer and destroyed him. I don't truly recall what I did, but rest assured he no longer occupies this plane of existence."

"Well," We started, "This may be a good time to test our Copy ability,"

"Copy ability?"

"Yes, Copy ability. We discovered we have the ability to copy the forms and abilities of people we meet. There are limitations though."

"What sort of limitations?"

"Range mostly. We can't use abilities if the owner of the ability in question is too close." We told her.

"How close?"

"Not a physical distance so much as a dimensional distance. We can't use abilities of a person in a dimension they have spent extensive time in. Say if we were to find Tron, we couldn't use his abilities in our home dimension, nor a few spin-off dimensions, but we could use his abilities and form here. Not that we'd want to because the only ability he has that we don't is the ability to wield two Disks."

"What do you mean by copying forms?" Yeesha asked.

"We have to morph into a form to use its abilities. It is part of our nature as a data form, We honestly don't know how our biological components integrate into this function. We think they are stored in Hammerspace when we morph or enter a computer."

"I'll ask about Hammerspace later, so how do you copy an ability?" Yeesha inquired.

"We only need to maintain a physical contact for about a second, though we prefer two or three to ensure a better copy."

"Well, let's pass it a shot. I'm pretty sure that's how the expression goes." Yeesha said, putting her hand on the table.

"Give it a shot, actually," We said, placing our hand on Yeesha's. Strange symbols we recognized as D'ni words ran across our vision, before translating into English for us. After a second the words "Download Complete" passed across our vision. After two more, the words "Verification Complete" ran across and we took our hand off Yeesha's. Yeesha's form flickered over ours for a few seconds before we reverted to our Base form.

* * *

 **Yeesha's POV**

"Give it a shot, actually," Composite told me, placing their hand on mine. I felt a tingling sensation start at my head and travel down my body to my feet over the course of a second, before spending two seconds going back up. Almost like a scanning beam, which it probably was in a sense. My form flickered over Composite's body for a second before they changed to their usual form.

"What was that?" I asked.

"That was us copying your abilities. We can't test them for a while though, most likely."

* * *

 **End Flashback**

 **Composite's POV**

"You'll need this to learn our language," Yeesha told us. She got up and carried over an _extremely_ large book. "This is the _Rehevkor_ , The closest English word is 'Lexicon,' but this is far more complex," she told us. "See that?" Yeesha asked, pointing to an even thicker book on her shelves, "That's a special version. It only contains symbols used in the Writing of Ages." She then opened past a few pages of the massive book that we guessed were basically front matter and stopped on a page with a series of images along a two page spread. Each image appeared to add a brush stroke to the symbol until it was completed on the bottom-right.

"We suppose each spread covers a single symbol?" We asked.

"Yes, I want you to learn each word, front to back. Concentrate on at least twenty symbols a day." Yeesha walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a blank book and an ink set. "You'll need a copy book. Okay, you'll need a lot of copy books, but this should be good for three or four days. I know you can memorize the symbols as soon as you see them," Yeesha said, noticing that we were flipping through the book, "But I want you to copy each symbol at least four times, because I want to make certain that you can write the symbols properly."

* * *

We worked on mastering D'ni symbols for the next few hours, getting thirty done to Yeesha's satisfaction. Writing them was much harder than we anticipated, and much harder than writing English. Once we had thirty symbols done, we started discussing our technology

"You mentioned Hammerspace a few times. What is it?" Yeesha asked us.

"Hammerspace is an ability that many Mobians have, but not all. It is basically a pocket dimension that Mobians can store items in." We reached behind our back and pulled our Light Cycle rod out of hammerspace. "The most notable instance is that of a female hedgehog named Amy Rose. She was the inspiration for the common name. She stores a weapon known as the Pico Pico hammer in hers. In fact, she can pull out pretty much as many as she wants." We put our Rod back in Hammerspace.

"And what was that?" Yeesha asked.

"A Light Cycle Rod," We said, pulling it back out, "We use it to summon a Light Cycle vehicle. Come on out, We'll show you."

We wandered outside and Yeesha asked,"So how do you use it?"

In response, we crouched down and activated the Rod. Our Super Light Cycle formed around us. "This is a Super Light Cycle. It was given to us by a program who later turned on us after we revealed our name. It is faster, and decelerates more while turning on the Grid than other models. It also has an open canopy, unlike most of the Cycle models in our home dimension. Camanion told us of a spin-off dimension in which Cycles are mostly open-topped like this one, but in our home this is the only open-topped model known to exist. It is also the second model in our dimension."

"Your dimension must be strange," Yeesha commented.

"Ours is as strange to you as yours is to us," We responded.

* * *

"Well, That's that. You have officially learned the written and spoken D'ni languages," Yeesha told us. She was speaking in D'ni now because we knew the language and she was more comfortable with it.

"So will you teach us to Write now?" we asked in an excited tone

"There are a few more tests you must complete," Yeesha told us, picking up a Linking Book from a shelf. This Book had gray covers with small black dots that seemed to be randomly distributed, like the small marks on the tile floors at FCon. The Book had a black spine and the word "MYST" written in gold letters. "The first test is simple: Complete the quest."

We nodded and opened the Book. The Linking Panel showed a sea of water, and then moved, almost camera-like to a view of an island with forests, a few buildings, a clock tower off the coast, a walkway leading to some sort of spacecraft, one very large tree, a hill with a gear embedded in it, and a dock with a sunken ship. The image moved to the end of the dock, and stopped.

"What have We got to lose?" We asked, and Linked.

 **And that's that. I hope you enjoyed. Sorry this one is so much shorter, but I'm having a bit of a writer's block problem on this chapter, but I already know exactly what I'm going to do next chapter. Plus, I do have some pretty good stuff planned for Composite's first Age. You'll never guess what. In fact, it was an idea that came up pretty much fully formed.**

 **Oh, and to throw this out there, spending a solid weekend playing Doom 3 is a surprisingly effective cure for writer's block.**

 **Until next time, This is SabaraOne, Logging Out!**

 **(Insert embarrassingly stupid post-outro comment here)**


	5. Myst Island

**Hello** **readers, this is SabaraOne online for a new chapter. I'm excited to get this one up because I've been looking forward to writing this one for a while.** **Yes, Composite will be running through the Myst games, or at least the important ones.**

 **Thanks for the review FourthWallBreaker. What I said about the games being the worst way to get the lore? I'm not discouraging you from playing them. I love how the Myst series was from a time** _ **before**_ **all the answers were given to you on a platter. Some of the puzzles in those games are** _ **really**_ **tough. That being said, I'm putting a spoiler warning because Composite will be finding all the solutions to the game puzzles.**

 **Now, let's get this thing going!**

 **EDIT: The usual round of post-upload spelling and grammer fixes, and added an extra line at the end of the outro.**

 **EDIT 2: Fixed a few more errors in the outro and corrected an error in the "stupid post outro quote"**

Chapter 5: Myst Island

We Linked onto Myst Island and immediately looked around. We clenched our right hand into a fist, and it started to glow, stretching forward into our HECU SPAS-12. Yeesha told us all the ages we would go to were safe, and we trusted her to tell us the truth as she knew it, but what if there was something she didn't know? Better safe than sorry. We noticed a door to our right that opened when we touched it. It slid to the left, and we walked inside. We turned off our music, because we had the feeling that it would be important to hear our surroundings.

We walked down a hall, a short flight of stairs, and a longer hall, followed by a longer flight of stairs. We were in a chamber that contained a pool of water in the middle. We walked around the pool, noticing buttons on the front and back. We pressed the back button, and it did nothing. We pressed the front button however, and the water disappeared in a soft, momentary glow of light, revealing a viewer of sorts. Exploring further, we found a control panel on the wall next to the stairs.

 **SETTINGS: DIMENSIONAL IMAGER  
Topographical Extrusion Test 40  
Water Turbulence Pool 67  
Marker Switch Diagram 47**

We pressed the button on the top right of the panel, revealing a set of controls. There were two number displays with up and down buttons and a smaller button on the bottom right. The panel was, of course, set to 67. We set it to 47 and pressed the button. There was a series of tones and the panel slid over the controls. We activated the viewer. An image of a lever on a pedestal spun on the imager for a moment, and the imager turned itself off. We set the controls to 40 and watched the viewer spit out a 3D mountain range, spin it around a bit, and retract it. Seeing nothing else, we decided to leave

* * *

We walked back up the stairs and out the door. We were back on the dock, with a greenish blue body of water with what looked like a sunken ship in front of us. We turned left and walked towards a curved set of stairs, stopping only to play with a lever on a pedestal like the one on the viewer. We left the lever in its opposite position. We walked up the stairs and looked around. To the left was the rest of the island, and to the right was another staircase leading to a platform with a large gear embedded in it. We wandered up the right stairs to the gear. We flipped the lever at the top and spent about five minutes trying to figure out the function of the gear. We couldn't find out anything about it, so we got bored and went to the left stairs and the rest of the island. We noticed a letter on the ground and picked it up to read.

Catherine,  
I've left for you a message  
of utmost importance in  
our force-chamer beside  
the dock. Enter the number  
of Marker Switches on  
this island into the imager  
to retrieve the message.  
Yours,  
Atrus

We wondered how the message stayed here this long if it really had been over two hundred years since The Stranger first came here, and decided that Yeesha must have made a copy for us.

* * *

 _Well, looks like we should count levers_ we thought, _We already have two_. We walked along a path of wooden boards along the ground, which seemed pointless except to make a path, which could have been done just as easily with a grass cutting machine. _Three_ we thought, seeing a lever near a building with a strange symbol on the front. We flipped the lever and wandered inside. There was a chair that looked like a chair from a wetware tooth doctor's office. We sat down in the chair, which automatically raised us to a console. The console had a white window on the left with a button next to it, a collection of slide controls in the middle and right, and a date display on the bottom which currently read

 **00:00 Jan 1 0000**

We moved one of the levers so that it read 14:35 with all other readouts at the default settings. The button next to the display started to flash, so we pressed it. There was a whirring sound, but there was no visible change. We shifted forward, and the chair lowered itself. As we turned to leave we noticed a button on the door frame. We pressed the button and the building lights went out, revealing an observatory dome. We closed the door to cut out all outside light and returned to the chair, which had small lights in the base, presumably for safety reasons. The console's window now showed a starfield. We twiddled the controls for a bit, setting random days, times, and years. Eventually, we got bored with this too and left the building.

There was a building with an open door, but it didn't have a lever, so we ignored it for now. Standing in front of this building, facing away from the door, we could go left to the dock, gear, and observatory, right to a walkway leading to some sort of spacecraft with wires leading from it to the area in front of us. This area had a courtyard with different buttons on poles that we found hard to describe for some reason. Beyond that was a brick building to the right of a path, a wooden building to the left of the path, and just beyond the shoreline was a clock tower, which currently read 12:00.

We walked along the platform to the spaceship, and spent a fruitless few minutes trying to open it. Neither telekinesis nor dispelling our weapon and pulling with both hands could cause the door to budge. We flipped the lever, _Four_ , and wandered to check the assorted buttons in the sort of courtyard. _Five_ We flipped a lever on the far side from the open building and investigated the symbols on the buttons. There was a flamingo-like bird, n English addition symbol that flared out at the end, a leaf, an arrow, a boat anchor, an ant-like insect, a snake, and an eye.

In the middle of the courtyard was a small water pool like one of Irras's birdbaths. In the middle of the birdbath was a sunken ship identical to the one at the dock. We pressed one of the buttons. The symbol changed from red to green with a sound. We pressed it again, and it changed from green to red with the same sound. _Huh?_ We wondered, but we couldn't figure it out, so we wandered off again. _Seven_ we thought, flipping levers in front of the brick and wood buildings.

* * *

We entered the wood building. In front of us was a boiler in the middle of the back wall. To the right of the boiler was a wheel. Turning the wheel had no visible effect, though our olfactory sensors detected the smell of gasoline or a similar fuel. We turned off the valve quickly. To the left of the boiler was a window, showing the tall tree on the Linking Panel, which seemed to be embedded in a large planter-like stone structure. Turning around, we noticed a combination safe to the right of the door, but we couldn't guess the code, so we decided to check out the other buildings.

The brick building lead to a long staircase. The stairs lead down to a brick wall with a metal sliding door. We pressed the button next to the door, which promptly slid up. A series of lights lit along a long room with a series of generators. The control panel in front of us had two gauges on the left and middle, and a series of buttons on the right. We pressed each button, each turned on one of the generators, and pressing it again turned them off. Each dial moved when we pressed a button, and then reset when we turned off the generator responsible for the change. We then turned around and noticed a plaque on the wall. The plaque had a copy of the control panel, with the left dial labeled "Volts," the second "Volts to Spaceship," and the third "Generator Toggles." We took a note of this.

We wandered towards the clock tower. On this side of the shore was a box with two control wheels, one larger than the other, and a red button in the bottom right. We pressed the button, played with the wheels a little, and pressed the button again. Nothing happened, except a lot of annoying squeaking from the wheels. We noticed that turning the wheels turned the different hands of the clock. We reset the clock and swum across to the tower. The door was locked and the lever didn't move. We went to the open building, the only one we hadn't investigated yet.

* * *

We walked inside, The floor was hardwood, the roof was covered with a dome with a globe on it, though what planet was unknown. In front of us was a bookshelf, to our left and right were desk-like shelves containing red and blue viewers respectively. To the front left and right respectively were paintings depicting the bookshelf lowered to reveal a secret passage, and one showing the exit opened. Behind us to the left was a map of Myst Island, which showed wireframe diagrams of all the locations of the levers. To the back-right was a fireplace. We walked to the left shelf and activated the viewer. It showed a Linking Panel, but the panel was just a field of red static. We placed the red chip sitting on the shelf into the viewer, which absorbed the page with a buzzing hum. The viewer automatically reactivated, but now we could see a person through the static.

 _Who are you? …must help me… bring me a red page… I can't… I can't see you… need a red page, you must… please… bring… I beg of you to bring… page… help… I am Sirrus… given up long ago… There is one thing I need to be resolved… you must…_

We walked over to the blue viewer and inserted its chip. It automatically activated and we saw another man in a virtual panel

 _Sirrus? Is that you? Who are you? …see you… Achenar… help me. I'm… bring me… blue pages to… forever and ever… blue pages… I must have the blue pages… Bring them to me, please._

 _Hmm, what should we do?_ We wondered. We needed more chips or pages as the case may be. We decided to check out the paintings showing the lowered bookshelf and the open door. We walked to the open door painting and held out our hand, recognizing it as a form of D'ni technology. The only reaction was a loud and annoyed sounding beep. The bookshelf painting, on the other hand, swirled in a whirlpool with a whirring hum. Immediately, the exit closed and the shelves on the bookshelf moved back, each shelf moving back further than the one below it, and slid downward to make a three-stair set to a passage behind the shelf, just like the picture.

We then walked to the picture of Myst island. The locations with the wireframe items included the library we were currently in, as well as a dial marking the location of a tower. The bottom of the map said "TOWER ROTATION," and the dial had a button on it. We pressed the button and a beam of light shot out of the dial and off to sea. We rotated the dial clockwise and the white beam rotated with the dial. It turned red when it intersected the gear, but we passed over it slightly. We tried to turn it back, but the dial only went clockwise. We rotated it all the way around, noting that it only turned red at the gear, sunken ship, tree, and spaceship. When it turned red at the gear, we stopped and walked to the passage.

* * *

At the far side was an elevator. We entered the elevator, closed the door and pressed the only button. The elevator squealed and ground its way up, rotated on its axis, and continued up. We reopened the elevator door and immediately saw a plaque bearing a Book symbol behind a ladder. Up the ladder was a window through which we could see the Gear. The obvious answer was that the gear held a Book. _But how do we open it?_ We walked down the ladder. Out back of the elevator was another ladder, this one had a key icon. The plaque at the top of the ladder read

 **2:40  
2, 2, 1**

We went back down the elevator and activated the picture with the open door. The bookshelf extended itself up and the main library door opened. We already knew what we were doing.

Only the clock tower and the observatory accepted times, and if it had meant the observatory, it would have dates as well. We hurried to the clock tower. Several squeaks and a button press later, the clock read 2:40 and a bridge made of gears rose from underwater. We crossed the bridge and flipped the lever, more because we could than because we thought it was necessary. The door was now unlocked and lead to a room inside the tower. Inside was some sort of console. To the left was a weight on a chain, to the right was a lever, and in the middle were some controls. In front was a small replica of the Gear. To the right and left were two levers, and on top were a set of vertical disks, all of which had the number 3. Strangely enough, it was the human number 3, not the D'ni number. We pulled the lever on the left, and the bottom two disks turned once, both now reading 1. Continuing to pull the lever made the middle disk move, scrolling through 1, 2, and 3. The bottom disk remained on 3. The right lever had the same behavior except the top disk instead of the bottom disk moved. Each time a disk moved, the weight on the left moved down until it hit the bottom and all disks stopped moving. The lever on the right of the console reset the weight and all disks.

Now knowing how to solve this puzzle, we pulled the left lever, setting the bottom and middle disks to 1, and holding so that the middle went back to 3. We then pulled and released the right lever twice, setting the top and middle to 2. The weight fell beyond its maximum depth, or rather what we thought its maximum depth was, and the Gear replica opened. We hurried to the Library Tower, stopping only to close the Clock Tower door.

* * *

The Gear was now opened, just like the replica, and we were pretty sure we could see a Book. We pulled our Disk off our back and activated it. A display projected out of it, showing a display of a Disk with different meters in the middle showing our energy distribution, with a ring containing several black, blue, red, yellow, and green segments. Coming out of this was an outer ring with three small modules, about the size of one black section in the middle ring at regular areas, seeming to project from the middle ring. The rest of the outer ring was taken up by three sets of symbols, labeled "Attack," "Defense," and "Utility." We tapped a symbol in the Utility section and a box reading "Triangulate: Alpha" appeared. We dragged it on top of a red icon in the middle ring, labeled "Submask: Alpha." The two icons changed places, Triangulate snapping into the middle ring and Submask under our finger. We moved Submask to the Defense category and put our Disk on our back. With Triangulate loaded into system memory, we zoomed our visual scanners onto the Gear and found that, yes, there was a Book in the Gear. We unzoomed, reloaded Submask and headed to the Gear, before detouring to the force chamber. We set the viewer to 8 and activated it

 _Catherine my love, I have to leave quickly. Something terrible has happened. It is hard for me to believe,but most of my Books have been destroyed. Catherine, it's one of our sons! I suspect Achenar, but I shouldn't leap to conclusions. I'll find him, and Sirus as well. *sigh* I_ know _I shouldn't have left my library unchecked for so_ long _! Well, I've removed the remaining undamaged boos from the library and placed them in the places of protection. You shouldn't have to use the books until I return, but… if you've forgotten the access keys remember the tower rotations._

At the Gear, we walked to the now open side and picked up the book. Opening the Book we found the Linking Panel showed an image of some sort of fortress. The image circled around the fortress, showing three islands spaced like 12, 3, and 6 around a clock, with 9 empty. Island 3 had a few gears on it, and another open Gear. Islands 12 and 6 had just some plaques. A walkway lead from the fortress to the 3 island. We pressed our hand to the Linking Panel and Linked to a new Age…

* * *

 **And that's that. The next few chapters will be shorter. I think I will set up the next few so that Composite fully explores the new Age and travels to the next in each chapter. Once I get to Riven they will get more up to size. If you ever played Riven, you'll wonder how Composite can go there, I won't tell you why they can't because that would spoil the ending, but sufficient to say that by Riven's endgame, it is impossible for anybody to return. Interestingly enough, Cyan Worlds, and by extension, the Myst games do exist in the Myst universe as revealed in Uru, and the original Myst was an educational game about the D'ni (Could have fooled me,) Going through Riven is really pretty pointless to the story, but it does give me a chance to actually** _ **play**_ **Uru before Composite gets there. Or at least watch it so I know what puzzles to put in, because Uru doesn't seem to like my box, though Myst 5 doesn't complain for whatever reason, despite the fact that they use the same engine.**

 **I know it took me a while to write this. Last week was a bit chaotic (Mostly my fault, so I don't have any right to complain.) Plus I just got Elite Dangerous Horizons (which actually helped me write while I wait for it to crash, I mean load,) and had to think up an excuse for why it took me so long to write the chapter.**

 **In this chapter, Composite summons their weapon using the animation from Sonic and the Black Knight when Caliburn transforms into Excalibur right before the final battle. If anybody has a problem with that, feel free to complain. It's been a few days since I had a good flamewar. Composite also mentions two subroutines from Tron 2.0, Submask and Triangulate. Submask protects the player from head shots and Triangulate allows the player to zoom in and reduces the slight drift when zooming. Quite useful for making long-range shots with a Disk.  
**

 **All credit for the viewer quotes and letter go to Cyan, as I got those directly from the Wiki. And on the subject, D'ni, while it is spelled "dee-ni" is actually pronounced "Dunny." I don't know why, but it's not my place to change it. I changed the Red and Blue Books to viewers because the Red and Blue Books no longer exist. Would be a pretty big plot hole. In the letter, the quote "I've left for you a message" isn't a typo, that's actually what it said, I checked.  
**

 **And I have to admit, I'm starting to get worried if I overuse separators. What do you think?**

 **Unfortunately, I've forgotten what the rest of what I wanted to say, so until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**

 **Oh yeah, doesn't the description of the stairwell to the viewer pool sound like Robotnik's stage in Sonic EXE?...**

 **WARNING** **INCOMING CONSPIRACY THEORY! EMERGENCY READER BEAM OUT REQUESTED!**

 **(stupid post outro quote inserted successfully)**


	6. Mechanical Age

**Sorry I'm late. I had a heck of a… Forget it. I was procrastinating. Anyway, I know that it seems like Composite figured out the puzzle to get to Mechanical pretty quick. That's because they did. The puzzles on Myst Island are pretty self explanatory. At least the one to get to Mechanical. Mechanical and Stoneship are the easiest. As in I didn't have to look up any answers when I was trying to get all the answers I need for the next few chapters (Because I'm too lazy to resolve all the puzzles.) I'm also doing a YouTube LP of RealMyst on my channel "The Blind Blue Bomber" (You didn't think I could do a blind character so well by accident did you? Not that I've done much with Camanion yet. I'm currently brainstorming ideas for something Risa and Camanion can do,) I'm putting up new videos and chapters at the same rate, but It's definitely chapters that are causing the bottleneck. I had LP Part 2 recorded the day after Part 1 went up. Still need to edit it and finish the chapter. Once we get to the last two the puzzles get a lot harder. I've also decided on a name Composite will use when they are going incognito as a human or other being without a particular naming scheme, but it'll be a while before we get that far. To throw this out there, the biggest problem concerning my characters (apart from the previously mentioned procrastination) is that, especially with Composite, I find myself in the mindset after I finish writing. I've gotten several questions while cruising around the Elite Dangerous galaxy after an extended writing session and misidentify myself as "We." To point out, any misspellings in the assorted journal entries, Red/Blue Book panels, etc. are all official. I got them straight off the Wiki.**

 **On the other hand the real world did get a lot more hectic around week 2 and 4-5, so my attempted excuse wasn't entirely without reason. I really should stop thinking up excuses before I start a chapter. They tend to come true. But that's a conspiracy theory for another day.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review. I know it seems like I'm rushing. It's a bad habit I've had since I started writing, where I tend to get excited about something I want a character to do in the future and attempt to get there as fast as I can. It's a habit I'm trying to break. You don't have to worry about me forgetting these stories anytime soon. It's actually starting to get a bit annoying, I can't read a good (or bad) book anymore without thinking of what great abilities Composite could copy or what they would do in a given situation. But**

 **EDIT: Forgot to mention thisenough talk, Let's start this. Thanks to Android Armada for the follow and favorite**

Chapter 6: Mechanical Age

We Linked into the new Age… and were looking into the Gear, minus the Book. After a moment of confusion, we started looking around. The island we were on had a lot of unconnected metal gears lying around. There was a metal grating of sorts with a railing around three sides for no apparent reason. Next to it was a gear-shaped pedestal with four slot-machine style wheels, each with a small green button under it. Each wheel had a group of symbols on it. Clicking through the icons revealed an addition sign, a half moon, a sort of keyhole, A triangle creating the top-left corner of a square, a pair of angle brackets, a circle over three spikes, a diagonal line with a circle on a middle right tangent, a vertical wavy line, a vertical rectangle with up and down pointing triangles to either side, and a circle with a square in the middle touching the outside. Under this whole assembly was a big red button. Setting combinations and whacking the red button had no effect except for lots of clicks and assorted clacks.

After a while, we turned away and saw a bridge leading to a large round building, the one on the Linking Panel, a fortress of sorts. A curved metal rod ran through the Bridge, presumably to hold it steady and probably allow for rotation, as the rod was the only thing connecting the bridge to the island, was connected to the island by a strong fastener, and was connected to the other islands in a similar fashion. We walked along the bridge to the rod and attempted to use it to walk to the other islands. The rod was in a cylinder and extremely slick. We slipped off of the rod and fell into the water, flailing around a bit in the brisk waves. _How are there waves with no wind?_ Probably our wetware instincts attempting to save us from bringing water into lungs and derezing from lack of oxygen. We used our telekinetic abilities to calm the water around us and swam around the fortress, but couldn't find any way to get onto either the fortress or any of the islands without bending something and causing probably irreparable damage to a mechanism. We then tried a different tactic. Tucking our legs under us in a kneeling position, we stuck our right arm between our legs and gave a telekinetic push, blasting ourselves into the air on a cushion of power. We floated back up onto the bridge and stood up as we landed.

We proceeded to walk across the bridge and entered the fortress. There were passages heading diagonally back and to the left or right. We walked off to the left and entered a room decorated in red. We assumed this must be Sirrus's room. There were a number of different objects lying around. There were many elegant pictures, many showing what appeared to be royalty. There was a wind-up bird that would move its head and flap its wings when wound. It appeared to serve no other purpose. There was a chess board missing its pieces. We immediately thought it was Ti'ana's old set, but it probably wasn't. There were some cubes that contained yellow, green , and red crystals.. Touching a crystal caused it to light up for a moment. An ornate clock and a telescope were also prominent, though the telescope showed nothing. There was also a table with items from Myst on it. On the left was a model rocket and on the right was a model ship.

We looked at the throne, which had an empty wine glass on it, and noticed a slight discoloration in the shadow of the tapestry to the right. We placed our hand on the discolored area and a panel opened up, revealing a collection of treasure, a fully stocked wine rack, and a red chip. We grabbed the chip and started to leave the chamber, but stopped upon noticing a note in the wine rack.

 _Sirrus,_

 _Your greed sickens me! Your desire for wealth and plunder is never satisfied. I will instruct my subjects not to pay your new tax and you know they'll listen to me._

 _Regards,_

 _Achenar_

We left the chamber, the panel closing behind us. We walked through a doorway at the back of the room and entered a small utilitarian hallway. In the middle of the hall was a capsule of some description. We walked along the small hallway connecting the back hall to the capsule's chamber, but we noticed nothin to help us. Walking back to the main back hall and looking at the capsule, we noticed a red button on the wall. We pressed the button, and the hall to the capsule lowered into a staircase.

We walked down the stairs, stopping in front of a console that had a display on the left containing two circles with gaps in them. The smaller circle inside the larger one had its gap opposite the larger one, which had a gap on the bottom of the circle. To the right was a lever in the down position. We pushed the lever up. The lever reset itself and we heard a grinding of gears. The inner circle rotated slightly clockwise. We pushed the lever and held it until the inner circle lined up with the outer circle and the display turned red. We released the lever, and the circles moved out of alignment _Blasted momentum!_ and the display returned to the normal color. We then held the lever until the circles almost lined up, released the lever and slowly set it to the proper alignment. The display turned red again, and we walked back up the stairs to figure out what we just did.

We whacked the button on the way past, resetting the staircase to a walkway from the sound of it, and returned to Sirrus's room and then to the front of the fortress. Nothing seemed to have changed, the Gear was unchanged, the Fortress hadn't rotated and the console next to the grating didn't seem to be any different. Trying to decide what to do next, we remembered the capsule on the other side of the walkway.

We went back through Sirrus's room again and looked at the staircase-walkway. The capsule had changed, probably rotating around, revealing a room. Entering the capsule and turning around revealed an elevator control panel. We pressed the up button and the elevator traveled up to an upper floor. The only thing we could find other than the elevator were some gears behind the elevator. We noted that the gear collection was in the exact center of the Fortress unless the map we had created while exploring the Fortress was inaccurate when compared to the outside size of the fort. Looking up on a compulsion we couldn't understand _intuition?_ We saw some controls on top of the elevator. _But how do we get to them?_ We entered the elevator and pressed down. This just returned us to the lower level. We then tried pressing the middle button. The elevator moved to halfway between the first and second floors and the door did not open. We hit down and walked out of the capsule, down to the back hall, and to the right.

The blue room we entered was presumably Achenar's throne room. It was a bit more disorderly than Sirrus's, and the decorations were a lot more macabre. The biggest feature was what looked like a severed monkey head positioned just in front of the throne, where it could be easily seen. There were also a variety of weapons from maces to swords to a collection of poles we had to step over. Oddly, there were no projectile weapons. _Probably not painful enough_ we thought. Achenar seemed quite sadistic. A small wind-up box was next to the maces. When it was wound, a false snake would pop out and make an attacking motion. _Probably scares almost anyone else the first time_. The only reason we weren't scared was that we were unaffected by poisons, being a data form.

In one corner was a machine of some description. It had two levers, both down, and a plate above the levers. We walked up to the device and a hologram appeared above it.

 **Fortress Rotation Simulator**

 **Calibrating**

The machine hummed for a moment, and the display changed to a picture of the fortress. The image turned from a side view to a top view, which then faded to a colored geometric diagram, showing the outer walls of the fortress as a yellow line with gaps on the cardinal directions, a large yellow "keyhole" representing the inside of the fortress, a blue circle in the center of they "keyhole," probably representing the machinery controlling the rotation, and a red line from the blue circle to the south exit, presumably showing the current orientation. To the right of this was a filled red bar. There were two levers on a control panel, one on the left and one on the right. Both were down. Pushing the right lever did nothing, the lever was locked in place. Pushing the left lever caused the red line of orientation to move slightly. We pulled the left lever back down, and the device made a _plink_ sound while the orientation line slipped back into position. We pushed the left lever back up and pushed the right lever, which was now unlocked. The red line moved quickly towards the east side, slowing about halfway there and then accelerating to alignment. The bar moved alongside the line, emptying rapidly as the alignment changed, empty at halfway, and refilling just as rapidly before peaking when the line reached alignment. This continued, south, east, north, west and so on until we released the right lever pointing at east. Pulling the left lever down caused a _pssht_ sound like an airbrake to play. We tried this further and found that each direction had its own sound, a _beep_ sound for north and a _bzzt_ sound for west. We made a note of these sounds. We set the device to east and wandered to the front of the fortress before remembering that the machine was just a simulator. We went back to Achenar's room to see if we could find anything else

Next to the throne we found a secret chamber similar to the one in Sirrus's room. The items in this chamber included an assortment of cutting implements, poisons, sedatives, and body parts. There was also an empty cage with a lever attached to it. Pulling the lever caused an electrical discharge into the cage that would put our Rod Primitive to shame, reenforcing our theory about Achenar being sadistic. On one of the poison shelves was a blue chip. We picked up the chip, and the red chip promptly disappeared with a buzz.

We dashed to Sirrus's secret chamber in a panic, and found the red chip exactly where it had been. Upon collecting the red chip, the blue chip immediately disappeared. We spent several minutes running back and forth, trying several methods, including putting both chips in the same hand, putting one chip into Hammerspace, and several methods that made us glad there weren't any observers. After about ten minutes, we concluded that it was impossible to carry two chips at a time. During these events, we also discovered that dropping a chip caused it to return. We _really_ wanted to know how that was done, as the possibilities for causing a little havoc were endless. _Priorities you!_ We thought to ourselves. _How do we get back to Myst?_ It occurred to us that we could try going up and halfway down the elevator.

On the second floor of the elevator, we pressed the middle button. The elevator made a beeping sound for five seconds while the middle button flashed. It occurred to us that we should probably step out, but before we could the elevator closed and moved halfway between the floors. The next time we decided that it was better safe than sorry and pressed the middle button telekinetically from outside the elevator. _If we can't bring the elevator back up, we canalways make our own exit,_ we thought, but the elevator beeped for five seconds, and glided down, bringing the familiar controls down. Familiar not because we had seen this particular set, but because it was the same layout as the Simulator, but without the display panel. We quickly unlocked the system with the left lever, noticing a slight movement in the gears in front of us. Pushing the right lever caused the gears to start spinning, and we could feel the fortress rotating around its axis. We released the lever, slightly startled, knowing we shouldn't be, and watched and felt the fortress reverse direction back into position. Locking the gears made the familiar _plink_ sound. We unlocked the gears and rotated the fortress, releasing the right lever when the rotation started to speed up after the halfway mark. The fortress slid to a smooth stop pointing directly east. We hit a red button under the levers, and nothing happened. It occurred to us we should probably lock the gears, and this time the panel started beeping like the elevator did when it was about to drop to the middle. We took the hint and got off the platform created by the elevator top.

Back at the front of the fortress, we looked out onto one of the smaller islands. We walked across the bridge and up a staircase carved into the stone. At the top was a plaque with the last two symbols for the console near the Gear replica, the circle/spikes and the half moon. We accessed a menu of internal settings with a blink command and navigated to controls for visual settings. We selected the control to save our current visual input to internal storage as a jpeg file. We then placed this control in our view so we could activate it as a blink control. Faster than navigating submenus. We could have used these controls simply by thinking about them, but we felt more comfortable using menus and blink controls. Probably a trait we got from Camanion, but we were happy to take a few such eccentricities in return for being who we were. We then went back to the rotation controls and rotated the fortress to the north, finding a keyhole and a rectangle with up and down triangles for the first and second symbols and saving the image for later. We then rotated the fortress to the west…

There was nothing outside the bridge. That probably meant there was something else. We decided to check the telescope in Sirrus's room, because maybe it would show something now. It hadn't when facing east or north. What we saw was simple but chilling. A skeleton, hung from the mast of a broken ship.

On that happy note, we rotated back to south and entered the symbols onto the console near the Gear. When we pressed the big red button, the metal grating we had almost forgotten lowered into another staircase. At the bottom was a chair, on which was a familiar-looking Myst Linking Book, though probably not the same one Yeesha had sent us to Myst with. Red chip in hand, we placed our other hand on the panel and Linked.

We Linked directly into the Library, looking up into the globe ceiling, confusing us for a moment. We walked over to the red viewer and inserted the chip into the input slot.

 _You've returned… Thank you for bringing the red page… You must continue to help me… My name is Sirrus… Release me… I beg you to find the remaining red pages. You must release me… release me from this book which has become… Bring … red page… I need more red pages, please… I beg … don't waste time looking … don't … my brother … my brother is guilty … and I wrongfully imprisoned … bring the red page to me…_

We then proceeded to haul back to the Gear, to Achenar's throne room, and returned to the Library with the blue chip.

 _Oh! You've returned … thought you wouldn't return … blue pages to rescue me… I am Achenar … my brother … I beg you … may be complete … always blue pages … not listen him, do not listen to my brother … egotistical fool and a liar… Help me … bring me the blue pages. Ignore the red ones, don't bring the red ones … earnestly implore you… I've been wrongfully imprisoned, you must believe me… I will have my retribution, please bring me the blue pages … blue pages, please._

During this whole thing, we wondered in a bored fashion how we could Link when usually only biological programs and objects they carried could use a Book, and we were decidedly not biological. We decided to ask Yeesha later. And speak of the devil, Yeesha Linked in, clearly panicked.

"Composite, I need your help on Releeshahn. That beast is back, and it's refusing to leave!"

She held out a Linking Book and we Linked into a warzone…

 **And that's a chapter. Don't worry, I will finish the game, but I really need a change of pace. Plus I get to show off Composite's combat capabilities, which should be even better now that they know more of their abilities. Just for the record, Composite will be going to Channelwood next, an interesting age to say the least.**

 **I will admit that the part where Composite rotates the elevator without noticing was clearly a simple lengthening tactic. It is almost impossible to accidentally miss this in-game as the animation requires you to be looking at the elevator while the staircase rises. It is also worth noting that the skeleton is originally visible in the telescope when facing the fortress north, but I moved it so as to give an actual reason to rotate the fortress west. In the latest release, RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, there is an achievement for finding it, as well as for sitting in one of the thrones. I'll try to pick up the pace on my release schedule, but no promises. I've got some major projects that have a much bigger impact on the real world than this.**

 **As for what I said a while back about Risa being my first OC? Risa has been in all but one of the fanfics I have ever written, the exception being a Megaman X/Battle Network crossover I'm working on. Camanion is named after Risa Camanion, the Risa character from a Homeworld/Star Trek crossover I've been playing around with. Those two will eventually get published, but their modified dates are in June 2015 and December 2014 respectively. Risa's first appearance as an AI is as a supporting character in a story that is technically independent story which was a borderline Megaman Battle Network fanfic (the final enemy was a giant centaur-spider, how much more obvious can you get?) N3tmaster made their first appearance as effectively the same character as they are in Camanion's upcoming stories, a rarely used powerful form, except with a human host instead of a Mobian. I'll eventually post that one… somewhere, It's not a very well-written story even if it wasn't borderline fanfic, but it's not all that high on my priorities list. I'm also working on a list of Composite's abilities. I'll try and post a dropbox link on my profile (once I figure out how) It's got a full list of current abilities, including a couple (but not anywhere near all) of the abilities and forms I have planned.**

 **As always, I know that I wanted to say something else, but I've forgotten it. So until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**

 **Now, where was I… [opens perfectly mundane work on computer]**

 **EDIT: Forgot to mention, Composite flies in the "Enemy's Gate is Down" position from Ender's Game, at least the novel. Never actually saw the movie.**


	7. The Beast

**Yes! I get to show off Composite's combat abilities! I've been looking forward to this. [Rubs hands like a cartoon villain] Just gotta get the formalities out of the way. But then we'll get right into the action.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review. I know I'm not great at solitary situations. I can do decent action and I can bluff my way through character interaction, but I'm still working on these sorts of solitary scenarios.**

 **Trekkie that I was, I was planning to have Composite use "Today is a good day to die" as a battle cry, but eventually gave them a different one. You'll find out in… about two minutes or so, probably a lot less. Now let's beg… [loud mechanical buzzing followed by a muffled "Shut up you!" Sound not unlike a computer being whacked, buzzing stopps] One of my spare boxes has a dodgy DVD drive. Should probably get that fixed… But anyway, as for the chapter,** _ **Oya Mando'ad!**_

 **Who said Trekkies can't be Star Wars fans too?**

 **EDIT: Reformatted the text blocks into proper blocks. Forgot to do that... Oops.**

 **EDIT 2: Only one grammar mistake I could find this time... Pretty good my my standards. And yes, I do go over them before uploading. I just have a habit of missing things before uploading.**

Chapter 7: The Beast

We Linked into Releeshahn and almost immedietly jumped to avoid a claw swipe from the beast, a giant green lion-like wetware program. It roared at us, and we shot up to the roof of a nearby building. We stood stock still for a solid five seconds while lines of code flew across our visual input, ending with the flashing text "ALL COMBAT SYSTEMS NOMINAL."

"Alright then," we said to ourselves, We drew our blades and briefly held them in a cross in front of us before flinging them out to the side. "Let's make it happen…" We moved the swords to a ready position "MAKE IT HAPPEN!" We then put our swords in their scabbards and loaded up a playlist of hard rock, and launched ourselves down the crater where the Linking chamber used to be. Our visor flashed, changing from transparent to an opaque red the same color as the quills on our helmet. We were curious what had happened to the Linking chamber, but we clearly had higher priority problems. We set a low priority task to pondering that because we clearly didn't need our full processing power to fight a bit-like.

It must have been rather comical, seeing our face as it went from exhilaration at flying down a crater into battle, to slight nervousness, as the Drone's eye view really didn't do justice to the size of the program, to horror as we realized we were going too fast to stop and slamming into the mountain of coarse fur and hard bone that was the beast. It turned and roared at a range of about six inches. Our olfactory sensors detected the oh so sweet smell of rotten meat. We shook off the stunning effects of the hard impact and loud noise and sent a wave of telekinetic power at the beast's face. It roared again and stumbled back.

We launched into the air and hovered about three inches off the ground. The beast cocked its head, confused, as we simply hovered. The confusion vanished as wee summoned our Drone. It apparently remembered the painful little noisemaker, who proceeded to inflict further pain as soon as we ordered it to. We commanded the drone to dodge around the crater, and summoned our SPAS-12. "Now, Let's dance!" We shot forward and blasted it in the side. It roared again and turned towards us. We halted it mid-charge by sending another wave of telekinetic power, sending it tumbling backwards. The Drone, sensing that it could not dodge fast enough, performed some sort of transformation. There was a loud clatter of servos and a swirl of motion, and the drone shot up into the air in the form of some sort of flying saucer. It flew over the beast, firing once its guns could depress far enough, and then landed, transforming back into its ground form before scuttling off, still firing. _We didn't know it could do that._

"Okay, now it's our turn!" We shot along the crater floor, sliding under the program. We then curled up into a ball, building energy, before exploding outward, releasing the power in a shockwave with a cry of "Psychic… Blast!" The creature went flying, crashing into the opposite side of the crater. It climbed up to its feet and growled at us. "You want some more? Well come and get it!" The beast stalked forward, snarling at us, "Not working," we told it. It charged and we skidded out of the way, hitting it with a shotgun on the way past. It roared again and turned to charge. We jumped onto its back and slammed our swords into the back of its neck… or tried to. They just bounced off a large bone plate covering the top of its neck. We went flying when the program launched us off its back, barely managing to keep ourselves from taking damage from the impact speed.

We shot out from under the pouncing paws, sending another Psychic Push to buy some time. As an aside, our low priority task deduced that the beast had most likely triggered an explosion with some of Irras's more dangerous forms of entertainment and blown the chamber halfway to Fcon. Yeesha would probably draft us into helping her make a new chamber. The lion-beast tried to pounce again, and we shot under it, sending it flying with a Psychic Blast. We found our energy levels suspiciously high and determined that the Drone had derezed. We rezed in another unit and gave it the same instructions as the last. It served as a nice distraction while we thought up some new tactics. We started with using a Psychic Grab to lob a two hundred pound rock at the enemy. This attack seemed to do some real damage, based on the loud crunch and dent in its side. Unfourtinately we were unable to continue this method as the rock shattered on impact and there weren't any other appropriately sized rocks in the area. _Couldn't make it tooo easy, now could it?_ We thought in an irritated fashion. We then decided that a form this durable could be useful. We surged forward, a trail of brown dirt and dust flying up behind, and jumped onto the creature's paw with a shout of "Download!"

 **Copy Form  
Name: Warkarian Giant Forest Lion  
Type: Wetware Non-Sentient Animal  
Strengths: High Speed, Strength, Durability  
Weaknesses: Low Intelligence, Maneuverability  
Abilities: None  
Known Morph Restrictions: Warkara, Releeshahn  
Copy Complete  
Verification Complete**

An image of the creature spun in our vision. We only noticed we had been tipped off when we hit the dirt of the crater. We telekinetically pushed the oncoming paw away and rolled back to our feet. A shotgun blast to the paw hurt it a little. A Disk to the same paw pad caused a screech of pain and primal rage. The beast jumped out of the crater and started to run off… Straight towards Yeesha's library.

"Sorry pal, Can't let you do that." We ordered our drone to head it off towards a field that was going to be used for grain next year and hadn't even been plowed. The drone morphed into its UFO form and made chase. A few shots to the injured flank convinced it to turn the way we wanted. We followed, hitting it with our Disk to keep it going in the right direction.

The beast made it to the field and immediately turned on its tormenter. It surprised us with a rapid about-face and sent us flying with a claw swipe. We hit the ground hard, attempting to roll with the impact. We ordered the drone to help us, and it revealed a new ability. It flew over us and used some sort of tractor beam to carry us to the top of a large tree. By this point we had recovered enough to land ourselves as the drone ran out of energy and derezed. Another message flashed on our vision.

 **Saucer: Level Up  
New Level: 0  
New ability: Blink  
Short Range Teleport**

 _Sounds useful,_ we thought, quickly recovering. The beast flopped onto its side, licking its wounds. _Out of sight, out of mind._ We finished a brief repair sequence and waited for our energy to regenerate to safe levels. It occurred to us that we had a lot of Psychic Grab fodder lying around. Unfortunately the Beast was simply too heavy for us to throw it, else the battle would have ended a long time ago. We picked up a branch and dropped it end-first onto the previous injury. The beast yowled and struggled to its feet, trying to find its attacker. Half of its chest cavity was crushed. _How is it still alive?_ We examined what we could of its anatomy through the Downloaded form. _Ah, decentralized cardio-respiratory system. It's got about five hearts and more lungs than we can destroy reasonably._ This would be harder than we thought. We dropped a few more branches on it, destroying one heart and about three lungs. Before dropping down onto its hindquarters, blades in hand.

The enemy program screeched as we plunged our swords into its back, managing to miss its spine by a few inches. _Blast!_ We scrambled up its back, occasionally stabbing with a sword or slashing with a Disk. Brown oily blood escaped from the wounds, making the creature's pelt slippery. We managed to stay on it, eventually managing to hit the spine about halfway up. The sword bounced off again. This thing almost seemed armored. A shotgun blast to the back of its armored neck annoyed it. It gave a roar and bucked us off, apparently uninjured from the attack. We flew back up and examined the damage. A seeping flesh wound, but nothing else. We shot up into another tree and grabbed a large branch, sending it down at high speed at the bone plate in question, chasing it down with a few pushes.

The bone collapsed under the assault. We jumped down, planning to fly in the hole and cut our way out. Our sensors detected something interesting inside the cranium… We landed on the head so as to get a better scan. A few active sensor pings found interesting results. _A symbiont. A hardware program in the brain case of a wetware. Probably not capable of independent action. And the armored spine… it is armor!_ We wondered who made the hardware program. We decided to simply take its head off while the armor was missing. It was already regrowing. A Disk and several blade slashes took care of the armor, and several more slashes finished the job. Trailing a collection of biological tubes, the head flopped to the ground, followed shortly by the decapitated body. The ground shook as the program landed.

The top of the head started to glow slightly, increasingly bright. There was a small explosion with a lot of smoke. A gleaming metal hardware program floated out of the cranium, sprouting a hoverpad, a metal shield, and three weapon arms. One pointed at us, and we dodged out of the way of a burst of fire. A small patch of grass burst into flame. We psychically pulled all the oxygen out of the area until the fire went out. A burst of metal slugs flew past our head. _Okay, what's number three?_ We dodged another fire stream, throwing a Disk at the slug arm. It bounced off the shield. We shot forward, grabbing the flamethrower with another cry of "Download!"

 **Copy Form  
Name: Warkarian Parasite Droid  
Type: Hardware Non-sentient  
Abilities: Flight, Modular Weapon System  
trengths: Flight, Rapid Movement, Weapon Variety, Strong External Armor, Regeneration  
Weaknesses: Weak Internal Armor  
Known Morph Restrictions: Warkara, Releeshahn  
Copy Complete  
Verifica-**

The machine spun rapidly, flinging us away. We skidded along the ground, spraying sod in all directions. _Yeesha's gonna be annoyed_. As soon as we got to our feet, the enemy program shot a beam of lightning from its third arm. We threw our left arm out and absorbed the energy with a cry of "Psychic…" and fired the energy back at the enemy with a cry of "…REPULSE!" The program's electric attack was channeled through our circuits, encasing our left arm in a crackling gauntlet of power, increasing in brightness as we pushed additional power from our own supply, before being shot out of our fingers in a dozen arcs of pure power, slamming into the enemy with the power of ten PRods. The machine crashed to the ground, sparking. We ran up to it and touched the top of its domed head.

 **Verification Complete**

With that out of the way, we changed our music to a country playlist and summoned our drone, but before we could order it to fire, it flashed up a message.

 **ENEMY_AIRMECH_DETECTED  
AUTO_ATTACK_INITIATED**

We weren't sure what an Airmech was, but our drone immediately opened fire. The enemy mech launched into the air, followed shortly by ours. What ensued was an extended areal battle between the two machines. We were only occasionally able to put in an attack, as the two were flying so quickly. Our drone was faster, especially with the aid of Blink, which teleported it about four saucer-lenths. After about six minutes the enemy craft lost its shield, and at about ten minutes, our drone was derezed, exploding into fragments and sending us a burst transmission at the last possible millisecond

 **AIRMECH_DESTROYED  
ENEMY_AIRMECH_ESTIMATED_DAMAGE_75%**

The enemy craft shot down to ground level, hovering at eye level. We repulsed its first lightning attack, stunning it for a brief moment. We took the opportunity to slash it a few times. It turned out not to be as stunned as we thought, unleashing a stream of fire at us. We stumbled backwards, hoping that our Mobian life support hadn't been damaged. We recovered enough to dodge out of the way of a bullet storm. We hit it with a push, sending it into the ground. We then picked it up, whirled it around to build up momentum, and crashed it into a large branch at the edge of the field. The tree shook, dropping a flurry of green leaves. The enemy program crashed to the ground, several small holes in its hull. _Okay, there's our targets,_ we thought, remembering something about weak internal armor. The program glowed brightly for a moment, and when the glow faded, the holes and a few of the larger dents were missing. We swore and zoomed out of the way of a gout of flame. Luckily, the shield did not regenerate. We summoned a drone, which immediately engaged.

The Drone managed to destroy the flame arm before being derezed, but we didn't have the energy to summon another. Unfortunately, the enemy had realized that lightning wasn't the best weapon against us, and stopped using it.

The enemy program surprised us by sprouting a new flame arm and blasting us in the chest with it. The heat burrowed through our data and scorched our life support. Hopefully it was just scorched. We responded by dispelling our shotgun and drawing our blades. We surged forward and stabbed both swords into the enemy with enough power to put our swords straight through to the other side. We then pulled our swords back and sheathed them, back flipping away. A streak of light on our right arm became our shotgun and we surged forwards again, unloading both barrels into it. It went flying backwards, with us asking "You gonna derez yet?"

"You're a never-ending bucket of surprises, aren't you?" We asked the enemy rhetorically as it revealed yet another ability. The enemy unit rotated its three gun arms into line and fired a beam at us. Bullets streamed towards us, engulfed in flames, with a spiral of lightning surrounding it. We were pushed backwards under the force of the blast, extremely damaged. It then made its final mistake, firing a single fork of lightning at us.

"Psychic… Repulse!" we shouted, The enemy robot crashed to the ground under the power of our reflected lightning attack. "Now, we finish you!" We whistled a four-note tune we had never heard before, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and shot forward. We lifted it into slashing height, sliced it into several barely connected pieces with our swords, and unleashed Banshee Wail.

"PIG PEN THIS HERE'S THE RUBBER DUCK AND I'M ABOUT TO PUT THE HAMMER DOWN!" The combined subsonic and supersonic blasts, as well as the much less effective audible attack, slammed into the program. The few pieces still connecting it shattered, and it collapsed in a pile of parts on the ground. We completely demolished it with a Psychic Blast, and the battle was over.

We collapsed onto the dirt, exhausted. A canteen thudded onto the ground next to us, and we heard Yeesha's voice telling us, "Drink up, you look like you need it."

We sat up and chugged the canteen. Easy to do when you don't need to breathe. "Thanks, you were right."

"No, thank you. That thing would have destroyed our town."

"We don't understand… It almost seemed like a symbiont. The hardware program controlled the wetware program's body, but there wasn't any wetware left to control. It was like somebody destroyed its brain and replaced it with a mechanical unit. Who would do such a thing?"

"I don't know, but it does explain why this one outsmarted its hunter. It wasn't just any other creature," Yeesha commented, "But you're right, it creates more questions than it solves. Here, come to my house, you still need to finish the other three Ages of Myst."

"That was awesome!" Irras said from our other side, "You destroyed the beast like it was nothing!"

"It wasn't noth- ow!" A sharp pain in our side told us of some minor damage to our biological life-support system. We winced and clutched our side.

"Are you okay?" Yeesha asked.

"We'll be fine. Our life support is slightly damaged, probably not from the last attack. It hit us in the wrong place to affect it. Probably the attack it fired right after regrowing the flame arm." We started to slowly make our way to Yeesha's house. We heard Irras mutter something about escort duty before being silenced by a dirty look from Yeesha. "Okay, forget this," we commented before transforming into a vortex of red data cubes, swirling outward from our feet to our head and collecting into a hovering cloud.

"How did you get that form? Yeesha asked.

"We didn't obtain this anywhere. It is our True Form," we told her. Our voice had the slightly distorted quality that is inevitably found in long-distance communication, no matter how perfect the connection. "We should be able to move faster." We rearranged our data to give the impression that we were looking at Irras,who looked away innocently. Now at a higher speed, we floated to Yeesha's house. Our life support systems slowly started to repair, despite the stasis usually experienced by items in Hammerspace. We floated into the guest room we usually occupied and hovered over the bed. Our data cubes swirled and reformed our Base Form. We fell onto the bed and fell instantly unconscious.

 **REPAIR SEQUENCE COMPLETED  
ELAPSED TIME: 03:08:38:45.13  
DIAGNOSTICS OPTIMAL  
SYSTEM ACTIVATION SEQUENCE INITIATED**

 **PRIMARY SYSTEMS ONLINE**

 **SECONDARY SYSTEMS ONLINE  
** … … …  
 **ALL SYSTEMS ONLINE**

We opened our visual inputs to Yeesha's worried face. "Hey Composite, you okay?"

"Yes, we're fine. Probably won't be one hundred percent for a while, but we'll be fine."

Yeesha smiled and gestured towards a side table. "Well, whenever you're ready," We looked over and saw two things. A Myst Linking Book and a Ki. "That's yours. You earned it."

"Thank you Yeesha, We'll make good use of it," We grabbed the Ki from the table and strapped it to our left wrist. It started to glow, surprising both us and Yeesha. Text scrolled across our display, which we repeated to Yeesha.

 **New Device Detected  
Scanning…  
Hardware scanned  
Software scanned  
Name: Ki  
Purpose: Inter/Intra-Dimensional Communication  
Integration Complete**

The Ki flickered off of our wrist. A moment later, it reappeared in the form of an aesthetic data construct. The functions had been integrated into our communication subsystems. "Well, that was interesting," Yeesha commented. We nodded, getting off the bed.

"Yeesha, do you need any help rebuilding? We noticed that the Linking Chamber was destroyed," we inquired.

"Three days is a long time. We finished rebuilding the chamber yesterday. It wasn't really that difficult. Though I'm not impressed with the job you did on that field. It'll take a while to get that one ready again. Hopefully we can get it ready before planting season." Yeesha replied.

"Well, at least we didn't tear up a field you were using."

"Well, can't argue with that logic. Again, whenever you're ready" Yeesha gestured at the Myst book. We opened the Book and prepaired to Link. "Oh, and Composite?"

"Yes?"

"Good job. Both with the Beast and Mechanical Age."

"Mechanical… the Gear age?"

"Yes, the Gear age. Now go complete the other three. I'll see you in the fourth." Yeesha confirmed.

We Linked.

The familiar, but still unsettling, sensation of being pulled into the Book lifted and we breathed in the sweet smell of Myst's air, unpolluted as it was. The water lapped on the side of the dock. We climbed up the stone slope to the left, past the Force Chamber, and walked along the planks over the healthy green grass. We walked into the library and immediately opened the secret passage behind the bookcase and rotated the tower so it was pointing at the tree. Our footsteps echoed as we walked along the passage to the elevator. The elevator ground and screeched its way up and we checked the windows. The first showed the tree, as we expected. The second had its plaque, which read

 **7, 2, 4**

We traveled back down the elevator, through the passage, reopened the library door, and out. We looked at the Tree, which was taller than any building on Myst island. We could sense some sort of metal device, but we couldn't get a scan of sufficient resolution through the stone planter to figure out the purpose. We walked into the small wood cabin next to the tree, and faced the boiler. Of course, nothing happened. The safe, however, now held our interest. It was a gray metal cube sticking out of the wall. It must have not held any metal, because we certainly couldn't sense any inside the safe, though we could sense the back wall, so it clearly wasn't lead lined.

The door was on the front, slightly inset into the metal. Three number wheels were embedded in the front, each with a button under it. A brass handle was under the controls. Turning the handle, as expected, did nothing. We entered the combination and stood back, turning the handle telekinetically because we didn't know what to expect. When the door opened with a rather anticlimactic squeak, we walked up to it carefully. It held only a matchbook. We opened the pack and removed a match. _Now… what to do with it…?_ The only thing we could see that would use it was the boiler.

The boiler was a gray pillar. The main section was a cylinder with a pressure gauge in the front of it. The gauge was empty. The base was a rectangular block. Most of the front of this block was a window, showing a dark gap. A smaller section was an open segment that looked like it would accept a match. The gas from our previous explorations had escaped by now, so we swiped our match across the side of the matchbook and poked it into the hole on the base of the boiler. The hole glowed slightly, igniting the pilot light. We turned the control wheel clockwise, and the boiler lit with a roar. We turned the wheel as far as we could. After fourteen turns, the pressure gauge started to slowly increase. The wheel stopped turning after 25 rotations. The pressure gauge filled up, followed immediately by a loud _Bang-Crack_ sound. The gauge emptied by two-thirds. Each time it filled up, we heard the _Bang-Crack_ sound. We looked out the window, and noticed that the tree was rising. After about the fourth pressure release, an elevator car became visible. We rotated the wheel all the way back. The boiler extinguished with a _whoosh_ sound, though the pilot light remained active. The pressure gauge began to fall, each time it hit bottom, there was a _Ke-woosh_ and the tree would fall. We waited for it to fall before starting it back up.

We set the wheel to just slightly up and hurried outside to the tree elevator. We were able to just get into the car before it went past. We patiently waited for it to get to the top, but nothing happened once it got there. We whacked a button on the side of the tree, and it went down one spot. After a minute of thinking, we decided to try going down. Floating down from the tree to the cabin, we reset the elevator to full down. The tree quickly started to fall, and we were able to jump in. After a very long four drops, we found ourselves in a dirt chamber supported by four tree trunk pillars.. On what looked like a tree stump was a Book. We opened it, revealing a panel showing a tree-filled Age with several tiered levels of tree houses and a large windmill. We unhesitatingly Linked.

 **And that's it! I think I did better with describing the environment towards the end there… To quote a famous green guy "Much to learn you have." That was definitely more fun to write, but I do still have plenty of content lined up. So how was it? Of course,** _ **now**_ **writer's block hits, right after I'm done with the main chapter and into my exit. So let's see…**

 **So I thought I'd start a brief shoutout at the end of each chapter to a writer/youtuber/game/whatever catches my attention this time. So this one will be to Norsehound, a Fanfiction writer. Norsehound's contributions to Fanfiction net are mostly Transformers/Beast Wars, but I personally think the best work is on the Relic Forums. Norsehound has made major contributions to the Homeworld fanfiction scene, notably the Children of Kadesh series, which is so well accepted that it is practically cannon, and many a HW writer has based their Kadeshi off of those written by Norsehound. And who can forget War of the Rock? The only Homeworld Norsehound work on FFnet in fact. Definitely worth a read.**

 **So let's see what I can use for an excuse this time… Oh, lots of work in the real world because I kept procrastinating on things much more important than writing Composite. And on writing of course. According to my traffic log, my story has 100 views! Though that probably doesn't mean much considering that 46 of them are on Chapter 1… Ah well, if getting my things read by a lot of people was the only reason I uploaded, I'd probably not bother. I'm still happy that people read it, but having loads of readers isn't my primary motivation to write. Composite putting the Ki on their left arm is because in Myst Online: Uru Live, the player wears a Ki on the left arm. Plus, they didn't expect to absorb its functions into themselves and wanted to ensure their right arm was free for combat operations.**

 **I was planning for Composite's drone to be a Sentry Bot from Doom 3, in fact the line when Composite finds it in Chapter 2 is a direct quote from Sargent Kelly to the player. I changed this after seeing the Saucer-class Airmech from the game of the same name. The Saucer Level Up is a reference to the leveling system in Airmech, in which increased combat performance in each battle can be unlocked by leveling up an Airmech. Blink is the Saucer's "Starter Ability," It can be unlocked at the beginning of each battle, and most players unlock it immediately. More importantly, the Saucer's ground form looks a lot like the Sentry Bot.**

 **Composite's cry of "Let's make it happen… MAKE IT HAPPEN!" is spoken, not sung, with the same rhythm that the line is sung in the Crush40 remix of "Sonic Boom" from Sonic the Hedgehog CD. The sword sequence is based off of Lynx's flourish from Shadow Fight 2. Maybe it's the same in SF1? Having never played the first, I wouldn't know. Composite mostly summons their shotgun in this chapter using the Mega Man NT Warrior buster animation, except that one time right after putting both swords right through the Parasite bot, where it uses the Sonic and the Black Knight Excalibur animation again. That particular attack is called "Blade Blast," but Composite won't be naming it until they need a proper moveset… Foreshadowing...**

 **This Banshee Wail is a line from the C.W. McCall song "Convoy," my all time favorite song. Just for the record, the song used in Chapter 2 was "Open Your Heart" by what would become Crush40, used as the final boss theme of Sonic Adventure. Of course any Sonic fan who cares enough to read fanifction probably already knows this, but telling the song is a good habit to get into as far as I'm concerned.**

 **Psychic Repulse is an attack similar to Force Lightning as it appears in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Seriously TFU is how Silver's telekinetic abilities should have been done back in… never mind. Most of Composite's telekinetic abilities can be paired with a Force power, and most share names. The exceptions are the lightning attack Psychic Repulse and the shockwave attack Psychic Blast, which in TFU was called Force Repulse. I got that list I promised up on my profile. It's currently a bit incomplete, and it certainly doesn't show even a fraction of what I have planned, but it does tell a few minor things I have planned, such as Ada Hopper, Composite's human form. I can't put the full list on my profile, after all, it's up to two pages now! You'll have to remove the spaces of the Dropbox link because of FF's (fully understandable) policy concerning links. I came up with the name Ada Hopper by combining the names of two of the most important women in computing history. Ada Lovelace was not only the first female programmer, but the first programmer period even if due to manufacturing limitations her programs were not tested until after she died. Unfortunately, her name was defiled by association with the legendarily terrible Ada programming language, which made pretty code that the paper pushers upstairs liked, but had long strings of instructions that are physically painful to write for any length of time. Admiral Grace Hopper worked in the Navy's computer labs during World War II and is, among other things credited (incorrectly, but only by about two uses) with coining the term "bug" in reference to computers, as well as the programming languages FORTRAN, the forerunner to many a modern language, and unfortunately COBOL, which lead directly to the Ada language. Okay, so I'm a computer history geek (and proud of it!,) get over it.**

 **On a happier note, I did find the original Risa stories I wrote about five years ago. They're a lot worse than I remembered. Not unsalvageable, but certainly not of posting quality, and that's not counting spelling mistakes! As I recall, at the time I started on them I was experimenting with a Braille 'n Speak 2000 notetaker from the '80s. I only have one computer that can interface with it… At a blisteringly fast speed of 9600 baud (the legendarily ancient dial-up internet connections maxed out at roughly 56k baud)**

 **So anyway, until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out!**

 **Now, I have a retired external hard drive that needs a little erasure… [sadistic grin] hammer, check, bigger hammer, check, metal mallet, check. Now, where did I put that hard drive again...**


	8. Channelwood Age

**Hello Readers! This is SabaraOne coming online!**

 **In case you're wondering,** _ **Oya Mando'ad**_ **is a phrase in the Star Wars Legends Mandalorian language. It translates best as "Sons (or Daughters) of Mandalore, Let's hunt!" The language makes no gender distinction, as in the Mandalorian culture males and females have equal status. As long as you can fight, you deserve the same respect and responsibilities regardless of any other considerations. Computers and Science Fiction, that's my thing. Except Doctor Who. Never could get into it.**

 **But anyway, On with the show!**

 **EDIT: Only one spelling mistake after uploading! Almost a new record!**

 **Chapter 8: Channelwood Age**

We Linked into the new Age, stumbled backwards, and landed on our backside. An instinctive reaction to Linking six inches in front of a large tree. We got up and looked around. _It really must have been a beautiful place_ , we decided. That is, beautiful except for the smell, which almost seemed to flow up in waves from the green waters. We were standing on a wooden walkway of some sort. The timbers were old and slightly rotten, and we hoped they wouldn't break under our weight. We floated up slightly to be safe, maintaining our upright stance to help our concentration. How we needed to focus to maintain an ability we could use effortlessly in combat escaped us.

The walkway ran over the green boggy water, out of which rose a large number of tall trees. The trees had dark brown trunks and rough bark. The lowest branches must have been at least fifty feet up on the smallest trees, never mind the tall ones. We could see two tiers of tree houses. The bottom tier were smaller, more numerous, and had simple rope bridges and planks connecting them. The higher tier was larger, in better repair, connected with solid wooden walkways. We concentrated, and were able to see more detail. We weren't certain how. Our visual sensors didn't zoom in, but we could see finer details, as if our sensor switched to a higher density. We glanced down, and were startled to find that the circuits on our arms and legs weren't glowing as brightly as normal. The help file icon appeared on our visor. We mimed tapping it with a finger and a README file appeared.

 **ENERGY DISTRIBUTION**

 **A program has a limited amount of energy. Some powerful programs, almost exclusively hardware and software,can redistribute that power to enhance their power use for a current situation. Combat programs have three power categories:**

 **Software programs such as ICPs and Digitized Users represent their power distribution through variable brightness of their circuits. Higher power systems have brighter circuits**

 **COMBAT: Controls the power available to offensive and defensive subsystems such as weapons and energy shields. Higher combat power is represented by brighter arms.**

 **UTILITY: Controls the power available to utility subsystems such as movement and anti-viral routines. Higher utility power is represented by brighter legs.**

 **COGNITION: Controls the power available to cognitive systems such as processing speed and environmental sensors. Higher utility power is represented by a brighter head.**

 **Most programs have six power segments. By default this power is distributed evenly. Programs that can reconfigure their power output can allocate these six power segments as they see fit. Subsystems with no power allocated to them do have small amounts of power available, but are not very useful for anything.**

A set of three bars appeared in our top right display, labeled COMBAT, UTILITY, and COGNITION. Each was divided into six segments. Combat and Utility each had one segment while Cognition had four. We selected Combat and Utility once each with a blink command and power equalized. Our visuals returned to normal.

After that little diversion, we were eager to figure out the puzzle of this Age. We turned around and saw a network of small black water pipes running along. Hovering along the pipe's path lead us to a valve connecting three pipes. We could sense that it was simply a hunk of metal blocking access to one of two branching pipes. We normally couldn't sense the workings of mechanical devices, but this was simple enough that any monkey with an X-ray scanner could figure out. The valve was set so that water would flow down the path we were currently on, which wouldn't help anyone except the tree. We flipped the valve so water would flow in the other direction, and continued on towards the source of the network.

We passed by two more valves and branching walkways before we saw the windmill. It was on top of a large stone hill, too small to be a mountain. It had six blades that would spin with the wind, like any other windmill. A path lead up to the top, along with a still-empty water pipe. _Well, let's not get our tail stuck in a crack_ , we thought, trying a weak attempt at humor. It was a concept we still didn't fully understand. We consciously stilled our tail and proceeded up the path. We entered a building under the windmill at the top of the path and stopped dead in our tracks. The engineering of the location was impressive. The walls were planks of what was clearly treated wood. The planks were slightly rotted, but showed no signs of collapse. The floor was completely flat stone. The main part of the room was taken up by a large water tank. Somewhat off-center was a pump that had a shaft leading up to a pair of bevels leading to a second shaft leading straight up to the windmill, rotating with the wind. The pump fed water into the top of the large white metal tank. The bottom of the tank led to the pipe that went down the hill to the other valves on the walkways. We floated to the ground and examined the pipe. We turned a brass valve at the connection between the tank and pipe and heard water flowing into the pipes. We wondered what we just turned on. Out of curiosity we wandered around the back of the tank to see where the input pipe went to.

Around back of the tank was another door. A small walkway allowed us to look over an ocean into which the input pipe plunged with water being pumped up into the tank. We hoped the tank wouldn't run out. We left and traveled down the hill. Following the path of the water, we took the first right, taking us away from the tree we Linked in front of. The path led to a locked wooden door leading to a stairwell. The door was rotted of course, but breaking it would defeat the purpose of the puzzles. _And where's the fun in a puzzle solved that easily?_ We went back to the first intersection and flipped the valve. The water now led past three more valves, all right turns to an elevator. It took us up to a second level, but we went back down because there was more on the ground to explore. We went to the second intersection and flipped the valve to the left. The next valve was set to the right, and we left it this way. The left was a shattered bridge. We guessed that all the valves started to the right. One right and one left at a junction later we encountered a switch in front of a missing bridge. Flipping the switch caused the missing bridge to rise from the water, which probably required the water power from the pipe. The restored bridge led to… the elevator. _No, a second elevator_. We noticed a branch in the path leading to a bridge with two halves of a pipe on each side. Turning a crank on the pipe on our side extended and connected the two. We could have sworn the sun shone brighter while we were extending the pipe. Returning to the second valve and switching it back to the right returned power to the first elevator. Switching the next valve to the left simply returned power to the extending bridge leading to the second elevator, which hadn't sank without power, so power for it was pointless. Going to the last valve before the elevator and switching it to the left sent power through the pipe we extended to the second elevator. We hurried to see where it went. We went up the second elevator and stepped out. The small room we entered was nearly bare of furnishings. One lightbulb turned on revealing a Myst Book on the floor. We didn't use it, since we didn't have a Page/Chip to take back.

We traveled back down and restored power to the first elevator and went to the second level. We traveled to the second level and exited onto a rickety bridge. It swayed under our feet, and we self-consciously floated into the air. Falling to our deresolution was not high on our priority list. Directly in front of us was a circular hut. We started our mapping function, seeing several others in near proximity. Getting lost was slightly higher on our priority list. The first hut in front of the elevator was circular with walkways angling back to the left and right. The left path led to a dead end. The right path led to an empty rectangular hut, which only had exits towards the first hut and the right. The right path from this one led to another rectangle hut leading to circular huts forwards and right. There were several tables with assorted vases and jars. We found no clues in the bottles so we left them in place. Forward led to another circle. The circle led left and right. Left was another rectangle leading forward to another dead end circle hut. Right led to another circle. The new circle led only right to another circle, which also only led right to a rectangle. To the left was another rectangle and to the right was a staircase down and an elevator up. We entered the elevator and pulled the lever. Nothing happened. The stairs were locked. We wandered aimlessly until we found a lever in a hut that opened the door to the stairs.

We were almost surprised to come out at the now unlocked door near the first valve from the windmill Now we knew what that pipe went to. We quickly set the valve and went back up to the elevator next to the stairs. As expected, the elevator now worked.

We walked along the third level walkways to the right of the elevator until we came to a hut with a gray metal door. Entering revealed a temple. A large metal plate on an alter rimmed with spikes concealed a viewer which automatically activated. Achenar's face appeared and said something in a language we didn't recognize, probably some natives. The alter was wood with a metal plate in the middle. The plate was rimmed with spikes. We tapped it lightly and were barely able to get our hand out in time as the plate folded in and the spikes popped up to slice whatever was placed on it. We moved out, still floating a few inches off the ground, and glided along the path we had been following until we came to a branch in the path. We decided to continue right. We entered a hut that was nearly bare. It contained a single lightbulb, a bedframe, a blue Chip, and a viewer. We decided it had been Achenar's room. The viewer had four buttons. We pressed the first one, which was lit, and watched the same message as in the temple. We pressed the next two buttons, which showed different messages, each in the native language. The second was a close up of Achenar's mouth and the third showed the lower half of his face. The fourth was a message from Sirrus to Achenar.

 _I hope I pushed the right button, my dear brother. What a very interesting device you have here. I'm not erasing anything important, am I? Hahahaha! Remember, he is preparing. Take only one page, my dear brother._

We left the blue chip and left the house. We returned to the branching path past the temple and took the left path. It entered the temple through a back way.. Sirrus's message played as soon as we entered. Now we payed more attention to it. The wood was vary sturdy, not rotted at all. A pair of masks decorated the walls above the alter. There were no offerings, but there was a bloodstain under the alter, indicating what the offerings consisted of. Almost certainly the work of Achenar.

Back to the elevator, but now we saw a path to the right of the elevator. We took it, It lead to Sirrus's house. The bed was well made. A red carpet covered the floor. We landed and examined the bed, which was perfectly ordinary. At the head on the floor were a pair of empty bottles. In one of the drawers was an empty hypodermic. _He's even more messed up than we thought._ We also saw a dirty sink in the corner and a table with a vase, an empty wine bottle, and a dirty plate with a slice of cake and a syringe. The desk drawer was empty. There was a lot of broken furniture in another corner, like something out of a crime show and a desk with another bottle, a globe of an unknown planet, and a drawer containing a syringe and a red Chip. We grabbed the Chip and headed down the elevator and stairs.

We redirected the water power to the elevator with the Myst linking book and returned to the Library. Inserting the red chip led to this message.

 _Ah, you have returned … additional … page … free from my prison on this forgotten Island of Myst… I see that you are… I am called Sirrus, for… I need all the red pages. I need… You must search … bring … two more of the red pages … I am released, I promise you … warn you, don't touch the blue pages … that is where my … for my wicked brother, Achenar… He is a man of distorted mind and senses. He disgusts me… Do not release Achenar … thirst for destruction is not … never-ending … bring the red pages … I beg you … please release me from this prison. I promise you will be greatly rewarded … you must help me … beg you to help me._

We traveled back to the Tree Age and collected Achenar's Chip. Surprisingly, the elevator back to Myst was somehow back down at ground level. _Not our problem._ We inserted the Chip into Achenar's viewer and watched his message as well.

 _You are back! Good! … still more blue pages you've brought for me … bring more, I must have some more … that's all I ask of you … long... been so long since my brother, Sirrus, wrongfully imprisoned me within this book. Stupid scheming … pretty speech has been … greed which is endless … should be perfectly obvious to you that … he has done evil and he has destroyed all but four… Do not bring the red pages to him. You must not let him trick you … he tricked our father … hideously murdered our father. He'll trick you, he'll murder you… Don't touch the red pages … beg you to bring the blue pages! …en to me! Listen! You must obey me!… The blue pages are my only hope! You must help me, you must help me._

 _So… Where to next?_ We went to the tower rotation and pondered. _Ship? Or Rocket? Ship or Rocket… Ship._ We rotated the tower so it faced the sunken Ship. Down the passage, up the elevator and around back…

 **October 11, 1984 10:04 AM**

 **January 7, 1207 5:47 AM**

 **November 23, 9791 6:57 PM**

 _Observatory_! One elevator ride, photo slap and outside run later, we were sitting in the observatory chair with the lights off. We raised the chair to the console and locked in the first date, pressed the button to lock it in, and took a visual save of the resulting starfield. We then did the same for the other two. _Now, what do we do with these?_ We wandered aimlessly around the island until we eventually decided to check the bookshelf, more from desparation than any hope of finding anything important.

Upon close examination, the shelf had five unburned books. They were all interesting, telling about Atrus's observations, but the important one was a blue and red volume on the top shelf. A few pages in were several diagrams of starcharts with symbols we recognized as being the ones surrounding the birdbaths. We matched the symbols n the books with our charts and went outside to the birdbath. We pressed snake, beetle, and leaf. We didn't know if order was important, but if it was we got lucky. We heard the sunken ship refloating, and watched the model in the birdbath do the same, and traveled to the dock

The ship was wood. It had many supports tied to the masts, many of which were broken. The sails were gone. A crows nest was on the main mast. Under the deck was a stateroom with a Book. Off to the Age we Linked…

 **And that's everything. I'll admit it was a little rushed towards the end, but Stoneship is by far the hardest entry puzzle to write. The last one is pretty easy though. I'm debating weather or not to do the "Post Credits" content in RealMyst. I might put it in later. I'm probably going to somewhat rush the next few, because I've got some really good things planned soon.**

 **Shoutout this chapter goes to Reddit user Gambatte, author of the Encyclopedia Moronica series on the talesfromtechsupport subreddit. Seriously, check it out. It's been running for over two years now with over two search pages. Long doesn't begin to count all the combined content. There was even an anthology at one point but the file was lost sometime in 2015.**

 **Composite's energy distribution is based on Elite: Dangerous. In that game power can be sent to Systems, Weapons, and Engines. The sun shining brighter when Composite extends the pipe to the Myst elevator is a reference to a graphical glitch in some versions when areas that were currently animated appeared brighter than surrounding areas. If this animation was full screen, the entire screen appeared brighter.**

 **Anyhow, until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**


	9. Stoneship Age

**Hello Readers, This is SabaraOne back online!**

 **It's been about ten minutes since I uploaded Chapter 8 and there's only two or three more to go! I need to do Stoneship, Selenitic, and K'veer (Part of D'ni) and one more wrapping up chapter. Then I get to my single most-looked-forward to story. Well, almost. There's another one, but I'll probably tack that one on the end of this one, as it's only about three maybe four chapters long.**

 **Anyhow, let's go!**

 **EDIT: Blast! Three spelling mistakes after upload this time. At least this time I checked before I posted it.**

 **Chapter 9: Stoneship Age**

We linked in looking into a black doorway built into an island. We were standing on the deck of a ship buried in the rocks. We remembered reading in Atrus's journal that he had attempted to Write the ship into the Age, but ended up with the ship half in a rocky island. To the left was an umbrella connected with planks. To the right was a staircase and a lighthouse connected by planks. The ship entry was behind us., but was flooded. We walked into the doorway, but were immediately stopped by water. Up the staircase was another door. Also flooded. This door was connected to the other half of the ship. Both halves were cleanly embedded in, no visible splintering or cutting. To the right of this was a staircase leading to a telescope surrounded with a metal band marking degrees. We looked down the telescope, rotating it. At 135 degrees we saw the top of the lighthouse, and everywhere else was simply rocks. _Note to self: 135 is important._ The lighthouse was also flooded, and had a trapdoor, which was locked.

We went to the umbrella and found three buttons. We pressed the first and it lit up. We heard a pump and went back to the rear of the broken ship, and it was no longer flooded. However, it was pitch black. We tried the second pump button, opening the doorways leading into the main island and flooding the ship. Both were just as dark as the ship. We pressed the third, and as expected, the lighthouse emptied, revealing a staircase. We noticed a key on a chain, but it was too short to reach the padlock on the trapdoor. At the bottom of the stairs was a large chest with a faucet on one side. We tried to carry it up, but it was much too heavy to even budge. We opened the faucet on the side, and several gallons of seawater flowed out. We closed the valve and reflooded the lighthouse, emptying the island.

The chest was now floating in reach of the key on the walkway. Opening it revealed a key which fit the padlock. The padlock promptly fell into the water. _Not our concern_. The top had no furniture except a battery and a hand crank generator. We turned it six times, recharging the battery fully. We sent our senses down the wire and discovered that there were a collection of power using devices in the hallway, and a switch leading into the ship. There was some sort of device in a tunnel between the two hallways as well. We decided to investigate that first. We idly wondered if Risa or Camanion could do this.

We walked down the now-lit first hallway downstairs and about three-quarters of the way encountered a panel leading to a compass rose with a ring of buttons around it. Of course, we pressed the one representing 135 degrees and even more lights came on. Now we just had to keep them on. That meant going back to the lighthouse every few minutes to turn up the crank. The first time we did this, we could sense that the devices in the ship, probably lights, were on.

The first hallway led to Sirrus's room. It had a very large bed flanked by potted plants. _Maybe some sort of drug?_ we thought, noticing several drug-making tools in a chest of drawers to the right. At the bottom was a Red Chip, which we collected. On a desk was an interesting little toy, a ball on a wood block which would drop into the block, which would spread around the ball, rotating, and then close up, ending with the ball still resting on top. It was quite interesting to watch. We decided we wanted to find one of our own. There were also a pair of globes that would project like a viewer if touched and a finely crafted red rug. _What is it with Sirrus and red?_

The other hall, of course, led to Achenar's room. In front was a hung ribcage, perfectly unbroken. While we didn't approve, we could be impressed by the skill required to extract a human or D'ni ribcage so perfectly. We only hoped that the owner of said ribcage had already been dead when the process started. Knowing what we did of Achenar, probably not. In the chest of drawers on the second from the bottom was a torn note reading

 _ **Isl**_  
 **The vault is loc  
The island of M  
Achieved very  
instructions are  
each of the Marker  
Turn every one of**  
" **On" position. Th  
As a final step, tu  
there to th**

We wondered what it was about. It clearly had to do with the marker switches on Myst. Maybe they all had to be turned on and just one turned off? We decided to investigate later. On top of the chest of drawers was a viewer. It had a slide lever on the front. When the lever was on the left, the viewer displayed a rose. On the right, it morphed into a skull. _Very Achenar_. Not somebody we'd want to meet in person.

On the left of the room was an unmade bed with a blue page sitting on it. During this time we noticed we had let the battery run down. We used our light-gathering filter on our visual sensors to get to the top. Our helmet visor glowed green using this. We recharged the battery, but sensed that the ship lights were turned off. We went to the Compass and turned them back on. We then proceeded to drain the ship and enter. We went down two flights of stairs and stood in front of a brown wood desk. We tried to figure out its secret, but it didn't have any drawers, there wasn't anything behind it, and there wasn't a hidden lever or button under it. In frustration, we whacked the top of it with our tail. A Myst book _grew_ from the top. As in it seemed to literally _grow_ from the top of the desk. We returned to Myst with the red Chip in hand.

 _With each page I can see you more clearly. Soon … free from this horrid prison; this book! You must visit the one remaining age … which you have not … confident that the … clear to you that my brother, Achenar, is demented. He is guilty … took advantage of the freedom our father had given us… Achenar began to … conquest… I ask you again … do not retrieve the blue pages … he will destroy both myself and you, just as he destroyed the other ages of Myst… never will escape… To release me you must simply bring the … red page… the story that I … your wisdom … you will see that I am innocent and he is guilty … this forgotten Island long ago … I will owe you my life, and you will be greatly rewarded._

"We don't want your blasted money," we said to thin air. We knew Sirrus couldn't hear us, in fact he'd been dead for years after attempting to transfer his mind into a ten year old Yeesha's body. Achenar had died stopping him. And speaking of Achenar…

 _Ah, my friend … you for bringing the blue pages. I see … convinced that Sirrus is guilty. Pray, do not release him … he will destroy me, just as he… And I, the innocent bystander have been wrongfully tricked into imprisonment … confident you have observed his unbridled lust for riches … the four remaining worlds… the gruesome plot, it was almost perfect … final blow to father, he tricked him into believing that it was I who was the murderer. I did not murder father! Release me! Bring me the remaining blue pages! Please … is a liar … fool and a liar … not be freed or there will … bring the remaining blue page from the last age of Myst! I must be freed; you must free me … I can not bear it here for eternity … I beg you, please free me … bring the pages, the blue pages…_

Strangely the battery didn't seem to have discharged enough for the amount of time we spent away. So… Only one Age left. We aimed the tower at the spaceship. The clue in the tower was 59 volts. We knew this had to do with the generators in the brick building, but we wanted to check something else first. Outside the library, we walked to the observatory and flipped down its lever. Nothing happened, so we flipped it right back up and moved on. We tried this on the birdbath, the cabin, and the spaceship before trying the dock. The switch opened up revealing a white Linking Book Page. We flipped the switch back up, closing the vault. Satisfied with our discovery, we entered the generator room at the bottom of the brick building staircase. We touched the first generator switch on the panel. Both the Volts and Volts to Spaceship gauges moved to ten. We flipped on generator two: 17. We turned off both generators and then turned on each of the ten, one at a time.

 **1: 10 2: 7 3. 8 4. 16 5. 5 6. 1 7. 2 8. 22 9. 19 10. 9**

This would be easy. We immediately calculated at least a dozen possible combinations. We then chose one, generators 2, 7, 8, 9, and 10. We were about to leave, but then on a whim turned on six. The "volts" gauge went to sixty and the "volts to spaceship" dropped to zero. We turned off six and sent our senses through the wires. We sensed the distinct feel of a blown circuit breaker. One walk up the stairs and up one of the brick poles running the power cable later, we flipped the breaker closed telekinetically. Power sizzled to the spaceship in all its 59… Watts? The voltage was high, almost 40, but it was actually sending 59 watts to the spaceship. _How do we open it?_ We walked up to the spaceship, prepared to spend another fruitless hour trying to open it. As soon as we touched the hatch it slid upward, letting us in no problem.

The inside of the spaceship was an odd sight In back was a… pipe organ and in the front was a control panel with five slide controls and one large lever. A viewer was above the controls, but it was covered in a horizontal plexiglass dome and blank. The organ started at a D note and both white and black keys, Four full octaves total, though the fourth was split between the D, E, F, and G of the lowest and A, B, and C of the highest. We opened a file containing a book page with an identical keyboard, with five keys colored orange and labeled in a random order.

One was second octave C, two was third octave B, three was third octave E sharp, four was second octave F and five was second octave A sharp. We pressed each key in order, memorizing the sound each one made. When we touched the first lever, it made a very low sound, first octave E or F we guessed. We set it to second octave C and set the other four in their respective places. We pulled the big lever on the right. It played the series of notes and the viewer powered up, displaying a Linking panel. Confused, we reached out and brushed our hand on the panel. We shouldn't have been surprised at the inevitable effect of the action.

 **And that's that. Short I know, but Stoneship really doesn't have much to offer. It is usually the first Age a first time player encounters, often by happy accident pressing the right buttons. I was an exception, figuring out the puzzle for Mechanical first. Selenitic has much more in store. Pretty quick upload huh? Yeah, I'm in runaway freight train mode right now, hoping to finish this one off by the end of next week at the latest. Definitely by the end of this month. It all depends on how much procrastination I do. Even though school's out I won't have much extra time to write because I've got a summer job. It's a call center job, so probably tier one helpdesk, but a job that has you constantly dealing with idiots is better than no job at all right?**

 **Shoutout this chapter goes to Youtuber SentinalH MC. SentinalH specializes in high-tech games such as tech-heavy Minecraft modpacks such as Revolution and Space Engineers. He has what is often considered to be one of if not the best Rotarycraft tutorial series on YouTube. It's certainly taught me a lot.**

 **Composite's new ability is somewhat akin to a Softwire from the series aptly called The Softwire. It allows people with a certain genetic mutation, only one of them human, to interact with computers with their minds. Composite's is slightly more powerful, allowing them to interact in a similar fashion with electrical machines of any variety. I won't keep adding more abilities at this rate much longer. Just one more, and it doesn't really count because I've already showcased it… sort of. You can probably guess what it is.**

 **So until next chapter, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out!**

 **Now let's see if I can get that Perfect Pitch achievement in RealMyst Masterpiece Edition. For solving the organ puzzle in one try.**


	10. Selenitic Age

**Hello YouTube, this is… the wrong intro.**

 **Okay, let's try this again… Hello Readers! This is SabaraOne back for another chapter!**

 **Obligatory Opening Comments**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review. Yeah, Stoneship didn't really have much to write about, that's how I got it out so fast. Unfortunately this is the last puzzle chapter. In RealMyst an extra Age was added (probably at the request of Ubisoft,) and I might eventually do that, but for now I'm a little burnt out on Myst. Or more accurately I'm a little burnt out on looking up answers so I can complete my chapters. The next few places Composite is set to go I won't have to look anything up. The next place I'm sending them is a lot simpler to write, and a lot more fun to play. Yeah, I'm sticking with games for now. Not for much longer though, the place I'm sending them after the next game is decidedly not a video game, though it does have a couple based on it.**

 **Anyhow, on with the chapter!**

 **EDIT: Disregard the maze instructions. FF's editor did a real number on them. Also corrected a few other problems caused by FF and added a slight explanation to the ending notes.  
**

 **EDIT2: Fixed a few spelling and grammar errors in the end notes.**

 **Chapter 10: Selenitic Age**

The Link felt somehow strange, like we were being pushed through the leaves of a tree than the normal sensation of merging with the ink and page. It almost felt as though we were being pushed out instead of simply slipping out the other side. Except for the Linking sensation, we wouldn't have known we Linked. Same rocket, same sea sounds coming through the open door, same sea scent. The Linking Viewer was turned off. We weren't sure weather or not we were glad.

Upon exiting the spaceship, the door closed and we were locked out. We couldn't even blast our way in. Our strongest telekinetic push simply rocked it, and holding the ship still took too much energy to allow us to properly attack the door.

We followed the path and quickly encountered a shack with a familiar looking control panel. It was the same layout as the spaceship, but with different sounds on the sliders and a confirm button instead of a lever. There was the sound of wind, a strange sound bearing some resemblance to a pneumatic tube, a train whistle, a camera shutter, an erratic electrical zapping, a strange resonating musical sound, a fire, a broken clock, a mechanical piston we recognized as the alter crusher from Channelwood, and a flowing stream. The code was well hidden in the device's circuitry, and we didn't feel the need to break it open. The door was, as expected, locked.

A few steps along the path was a branch, straight and left. We took left. The path led across several brick bridges and eventually led to an overlook of a stream making the same sound we heard at the shack. There was a stand with a pictogram of water dripping into a pool and a button. Above the stand was a transmitter and a microphone. We had learned that while the D'ni _had_ what humans would call "High Technology," they simply preferred not to use it, but this preference didn't get in the way of simple pragmatism. If it was significantly more difficult or impossible to do something without, they'd use it. It was far easier to set up a transmitter and receiver set than channel sounds through a set of resonance pipes, and there was a good chance the sound would be distorted through a tube. Irras had an extensive collection of human entertainment viewer chips, some on optical disks and some on two different formats of magnetic tape. We pressed the button, and the pictogram lit up green. We could sense the transmitter fire away. Switching our visuals to blue-glowing full spectrum mode allowed us to see the radio waves flow to a receiver in the distance. We returned our visuals to normal and saw a blue Chip nearby. We put it in Hammerspace and moved on.

We took the path that was forward from the shack and quickly encountered yet another fork left and forward. Left led to a chasm over a magma river. Another transmitter stood over the river, where the fire noise was coming from. We pressed the button and retreated quickly before the extreme heat could penetrate our data shell and damage our biological subsystems. How The Stranger did this so long ago without being fried to a crisp eluded us. Though maybe the magma was hotter than it had been. Atrus had established in his notebooks that this Age was constantly changing, even if not in the areas he had explored. Straight down the path was a damaged clock. We pressed its transmitter on and continued. Another fork led this time forward and right. Right led to a collection of crystals making the musical sound as the wind blew through it. The red Chip was sitting on the top of the controls. We marked the spot on our mapping system. Forward from the fork led to a wind tunnel with a transmitter. We pressed it as well and traveled down a ladder into the wind. It was almost pitch black. We noted a switch on the wall and flipped it, turning on the lights along the ceiling and spooking a colony of bats. Climbing the ladder at the end of the tunnel had us at the receiver.

It was an almost-silo looking device that had five receiver dishes and two doors in front. The doors swung open at our touch revealing a console. The top half was a screen with speakers on either side. The lower half had three rows of controls. The first was two arrows left and right and a display of the current compass angle. The second row had five buttons each with one of the different button symbols, water falling in a pool for the first, flames for the second, a damaged clock for the third, crystals for a forth, and wind emerging from a vertical tunnel for the fifth. The bottom row had a single button. Pressing this button caused the display to toggle through several different views and the speakers to emit static. We could sense power flowing to each button in a seemingly random order, but they didn't seem to light up, despite it being the same amount of power used to light the buttons when pressed. We selected water and started adjusting the setting by swiping the screen, though we could have used the arrow buttons. When one of the antennas at the top of the reciever device was pointed near the water, we could hear it gurgling and lapping downstream through static. The left arrow lit up, flickering. We pressed it a few more times and the signal came loud and clear. We noted the degrees in case they became important and selected the fire. After some work we pointed all the receivers in the right directions. They each seemed to be running on different frequencies, as we didn't hear the water when we pointed the crystal at it. We pressed the bottom button and it confirmed what we had sensed earlier about the order.

 **1\. Crystal: 15 2. Water: 153.4 3. Wind: 212.2 4. Fire: 130.3 5. Clcok: 55.6**

We hauled back to the shack and entered the appropriate keypad combination. The metal door slid up and we walked down the corridor. This put us in a large room. Its most notable feature was a large maglev car in the middle. We walked up to it and pressed a blue button next to the door of the car. The door slid up and down in two halves. Inside we sat in a comfortable leather chair. Comfortable for more conventional humanoids anyway. We had to stick our tail out at an uncomfortable angle. The controls were simple. A large porthole was at the top. Below this were buttons labeled forward, left, right, and backtrack. To the left of this cluster was a speaker with a button. To the right was a compass. We pressed forward and the car dropped down into a cavern, stopping on a track. The speaker emitted a familiar _beep_ sound. The car was pointed North, so we went forward. Next it made a just as familiar _bzzt_ sound. We rotated west. By following the sound cues, which were identical to those in Mechanical, we were able to easily find our way out of the maze. Our mapping functions didn't hurt. The final route seemed to be

 **SW W NW NE E SE**

At this point the car refused to turn, so we tried to leave. The door opened, which it hadn't while in the maze, and we walked up to a Myst Book and returned to the Library, blue Chip in hand

 _Hello. I am Achenar. I am glad to see that you have returned to help me escape from my wrongful imprisonment. It was Sirrus who did this to me. Sirrus, my wicked brother. Do not listen to him! I warn you! I warn you again: he is a liar. Do not be persuaded by his evil lies. Do not release him. He killed my father! He will kill you._

 _It began when my brother, Sirrus, began to lust for riches. He stole from the Ages of Myst. He horded up riches for himself. While father… father slept away his watchfulness, my sick brother secretly pronounced himself king. King of the Ages of Myst, he said… He began to look upon me in disgust … his … lowly brother…_

 _I hated him! And then Sirrus began to destroy the Ages of Myst. He burned their forests. He tore down their structures. He flooded their lands. He murdered their inhabitants. He completely destroyed all but four of the ages._

 _Of course, I had to warn my Father, but when I finally found him … there was Sirrus also, talking cleverly, with the lying tongue of a serpent…_

 _He convinced Father that it was I who had destroyed the Ages… He convinced father that it was I who was greedy for wealth and plunder. And as Sirrus dealt the final blow, he tricked Father into believing that I was the murderer._

 _But Sirrus did not deal as fast a blow as he planned, and as Father died a slow death he at last doubted my brother's clever lies. And so, in dying, father imprisoned us both, unsure from which of us the blow had come._

 _I swear to you, what I say is the truth. Release me. You must release me! My brother is a deceitful liar and deserves punishment. I only wish vengeance for my dear Father's wrongful murder. Believe me._

 _You must only recover one additional page to release me from this prison. It is the easiest to find._

 _Go to the bookshelf that is in this library. On the far right side of the middle shelf, there is a burned book which is different from the other burnt books; this book is filled with patterns. Find pattern ***. Mimic it's design on the panel in the fireplace. Doing this will bring you to the last blue page._

 _Remember, don't take the red page. Take only the blue page and return it quickly to me._

 _And do not touch the green book! It is a clever trap to imprison those who have not been warned. (crazy laughter) Do not be tempted: for you will rot and die, imprisoned as I am._

 _I tell you, if you follow my instructions it will be well worth your while. I promise you that. Go. Go._

One trip to the Crystal Music and Maze later,

 _Ah… You've finally returned. I owe you a debt of gratitude, for you have nearly released me. My name is Sirrus. I trust that, from your explorations, you've become convinced that my wicked brother, Achenar, is guilty and I am innocent. It is I who am wrongly imprisoned here; imprisoned by my father._

 _I don't know who you are or how you came to this island, but I assume you must at least know something of the books. It was father who was a master of the books. He wrote hundreds of them, all describing and linking to the fantastic places and ages he had discovered. The room in which you now stand was our father's library. It was here, in this room, on this island named Myst, that he housed most of these books._

 _But such a waste… By now you have surely already discovered that Achenar has burnt and mutilated most of these books. Why?_

 _Our father was always watchful of our explorations. We grew up under his strict supervision. But when we came of age, he gave us unbridled access to the Myst books. He began to leave our adventures more and more unchecked. Unsupervised as we were, my brother began to become disturbed. He began to take more from the Myst Ages than he had given. Soon he gained a twisted pleasure from the conquest and destruction of the other ages. It was horrific—this thirst for the destruction. But alas, even I discovered his insanity too late. He had completely destroyed all the Myst ages but four._

 _I wasted no time in warning my father. I thought he would recognize Achenar's guilt. But in a fit of rage he imprisoned both my brother and myself within the pages of these books, designed to hold us until he could judge which of us was guilty._

 _To discover the truth, our father embarked on one final journey. However, he has never returned. I can only assume that he perished along the way, leaving me, an innocent victim, entrapped forever… But now you are here to release me. Listen carefully. You must find one more page and I will be forever free._

 _There is a book on the shelves in this library which is mostly burnt but has a few pages still intact. It is the last book on the middle shelf. Find it._

 _This book is filled with a variety of patterns. Find pattern ***, and recreate it on the door of the fireplace. This will bring you to the last red page. Bring that page to me and I will finally be released, and able to reward you, of course._

 _Ignore the blue page. That page finishes my brother's book. It chills me to even think what would happen if you were to release him…_

 _There is another warning. Where the red and blue pages reside, also resides a green book. If you touch the green book you also will be imprisoned forever. Our father gave us this same warning long ago. I suggest you follow his advice._

 _Go now. Soon we will meet face to face._

 _Let's do this_. We quickly located the book the brothers had told us about and memorized the pattern. It had a large collection of squares, some shaded some not. Each pattern was eight wide and six tall. They seemed completely random. It took us a few moments to flip to pattern 158. It was lucky that the book had not burned, in fact the pages were charred around the edges. Sirrus and Achena must have intentionally made this one look damaged to ward off curious explorers. _Now… Fireplace door?_ We crawled into the fireplace in the Library and searched for a door. There wasn't one in the back wall. We then tried searching the rim of the front, quickly finding a button. A large white panel dropped down in front of us. We tapped in the center of it, and a square section pushed in with a _Zezert_ noise. _Sorted!_ We quickly entered the memorized pattern, 158 of 300 and pressed the button that had summoned the panel. The fireplace turned around, surprising us. There were two shelves in front of us. The bottom contained blue and red chips. On the top shelf was a green viewer and a green Book. The Book led straight to D'ni, though we didn't follow it yet. We activated the green viewer.

 _Who the devil are you? D–Don't come here to D'ni—not yet. Oh, I have many questions for you, my friend, as you, no doubt, have for me. Where should I begin? Oh, perhaps my story is in order. My name is Atrus. I fear you have met my sons, Sirrus and Achenar, in the red and blue books, on Myst Island, in my library, my library…. Oh, it contains my works, my writings. Oh, I wrote many books, many books that linked me to fantastic places. It's an Art I learned from my father many years ago. Oh, but the red and blue books, those were different. I wrote those books to entrap over-greedy explorers that might stumble upon my island of Myst. But I had no idea my own sons would be entrapped._

 _My sons, Sirrus and Achenar, we had many journeys together. I gave them free reign to the books. Perhaps it was not wise. I could see the greed growing in them. I had not told them about the red and blue books. Their imaginations went wild; they dreamed of riches and power! Of course, they did not know the books were traps. They begged for access to those books and I, of course, denied them. Oh, they devised a plan, an evil plan. I had no idea to what extent their greed had… had… progressed. Their own mother—they used their own mother—Oh, my dear Catherine!—to lure me here to D'ni. Of course, I could return to Myst, except they removed a single page from my Myst Linking Book. I cannot return without that page—you, my friend, can bring that page to me. Oh, I pray you believe my story above the lies that my sons have told you. If you would find it in yourself to return that page to me here in D'ni, I could go to Myst, and bring justice to my sons for what they have done. I must return to my writing. I pray that you believe me. Please hurry. Bring the page. Bring the page with you._

We quickly turned the fireplace around and retrieved the White Page from the vault in the Stoneship marker switch, rotating the fireplace simply by activating the pattern panel. Upon returning, we activated the viewer

 _Have you found the missing page? Oh, come, come. Come on then._

We didn't trust either Sirrus or Achenar. Of course we already knew Atrus was right, but we would have gone with him anyway. A notification icon appeared on our visual sensors.

 **Compilation Job Complete: 01:04:15:42:34.591**

 _Finally!_ That compilation job we'd been running at low priority for the last week and a half was finished. We put the file **Ada .Base** **.morph** into its proper location. _Let's surprise Yeesha a bit_. We selected an icon on our display for the first time. A menu containing two columns appeared in front of us. One column was labeled COPIED. This had the items Yeesha, Warkarian Giant Forest Lion, and Warkarian Parasite Droid. The other column was labeled SELF. This had one option, Ada Hopper. We selected Ada. To the right of the table, a preview pane displayed an ordinary female human. Around the edges information about the Ada form flickered. We selected the button under the preview labeled MORPH..

This caused us to hop into the air, holding our arms out to the sides. A swirling vortex of green energy appeared around our form as we transformed from a five foot nine Mobian in a power suit to a female human wearing casual jeans and a T-shirt emblazened with a large amount of encryption software source code and a banner reading

 **WARNING  
This shirt is classified as a munition and  
may not be exported from the United  
States, or shown to a foreign nation  
RSA  
encryption in part**

It was a shirt Camanion had told us about from one of her computer history classes specializing in security. It was used by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of their "Crypto War" against government agencies such as the NSA, who had been trying to drastically limit the effectiveness of encryption software both inside and outside the US. Camanion had told us about the NSA's encryption software DES-56, which was considered to be unbreakable from the mid 1980s through most of the 1990s. Starting in 1997, a security company by the name RSA, the same company that created and released the RSA encryption software on the shirt to the public domain, created a series of "DES Challanges" to prove that DES's 56 bit key length was too short to be secure. The first was won in 96 days. DES Challenge II-1 was won in 39 days in early 1998. by distributed computing website distributed. net. DES Challange II-2 was won by the EFF's $250,000 purpose built "Deep Crack" machine in 56 hours. In January 1999, DES Challenge III was won in 22 hours 15 minutes by distributed. net and Deep Crack. Camanion had a Beowulf cluster valued at $3,000 made up of retired gaming PCs that had cost a combined total of $10,000 when they were top-of-the-line kit that could crack any DES message ever written in under twelve hours.

It took us no time at all to open the green Book and Link to the old D'ni cavern on the island of K'veer. We were standing in a large circular stone room. Many alcoves were cut into the wall at regular intervals. It had a very ancient look about it. Not surprising. Upon us entering, we were looking at a desk. It was somewhat messy, with an ink well, a quill, and several Books. A viewer sprang to life.

 _Ah, my friend. You've returned. And the page, did you bring the page? Ah, give it to me… Give me the page… Please, give the page… The page my friend, the page… [page appears in Atrus's hand] You've done the right thing. I have a difficult choice to make. [puts page in book] My sons have betrayed me. I know what I must do. I shall return shortly. [links out]_

 _[links in] Hmm, it is done. I have many questions for you, my friend, but my writing can not wait. I fear that my long delay may have already had a catastrophic impact on the world in which my wife, Catherine, is now being held hostage. Oh, a reward, I'm sorry, but all I have to offer you is the library on the island of Myst and the books that are contained there. Feel free to explore at your leisure. I hope you find your explorations satisfying. You will no longer have my sons to deal with. Oh, and one more thing. I am fighting a foe much greater than my sons could even imagine. At some point in the future, I may find it necessary to request your assistance. Until that point, I'm afraid you'll enjoy the explorations from my library on Myst. Thank you. The book, you can use the Myst Linking Book to return to Myst._

At this point we inserted the White Page into the Myst book Yeesha had left on the desk. We stood back outside the door to the study, which still bore the marks from when Atrus had been forced to cut his way out after a rockfall, and waited. A minute later we heard two people Link in. We walked around the corner to see Yeesha and Irras, obviously looking for us.

"Hello, who are you?" Yeesha inquired

"I'm Ada Hopper of the D'ni Restoration Agency, and who might you be?" we responded.

"I'm Yeesha of the D'ni and this is my friend Irras. Do I know you? You sound familiar, but I can't place your face."

"Sorry, I don't think we've met." I held out my hand to shake, "What brings you here?"

"We came here to tell my student that they've passed their final test and we can begin with the Writing lessons now."

"We're glad to hear it." We crossed our arms over our chest and glowed with a soft light for a moment, reverting to our Base Form. Yeesha started and Irras started to go for his Book to escape. "Gotcha Yeesha, we knew we'd get a reaction out of you eventually!"

Yeesha put her hand over her heart in mock relief. "Oh, Composite, it's just you. You scared me when you transformed like that!" We shared a laugh at this. "So, you've passed. Any questions about Myst and its Ages?"

"Two actually. One, why is the spaceship generator panel written in volts and two, what is the button in the back of the Force Chamber Viewer for?"

Yeesha and Irras shared a glance and burst out laughing. "I can answer both of those questions with one word. Cyan! When the DRA approached the company that is now Cyan Worlds about creating an educational game about the D'ni based on the adventures of The Stranger, they messed up a ffew things. Atrus had the plate changed from Watts to Volts as a joke in response to one of the idiots at Cyan not knowing the difference. As for the button at the back of the viewer, that's a similar story. Back in…"

"…Late 2000" Irras picked up. We all knew Yeesha knew the year, but everyone also knew we had to led Irras feel included by giving a few facts here and there.

"Yes, 2000, when Cyan and Sunsoft were developing a remake called RealMyst, the publisher Ubisoft insisted they add a new Age so that people who already had the 1994 and early 2000 Masterpiece Edition, and maybe even the Trilogy release would have a reason to buy the new version. Cyan wasn't happy about it, but they complied. Part of getting to the new Age required the player to enter a code on the viewer, the topographical test in fact, activate the front button, and then go around the back and activate the rear button. Atrus added that button as a joke. The Age is completely fictional, though it wouldn't be that hard to Write… Ah well, something to do in my Copious Spare Time."

"Of which you have none," Irras pointed out

"Sarcasm."

"Oh, of course."

At this point the conversation dissolved completely into good-natured banter before we Linked back to Releeshahn to begin learning.

 **Jump Cut: One hour**

"So, here's the Age Lexicon. Thirty symbols per day. You know the drill." Yeesha told us, hauling over a book a quarter as tall as she was, "When that's done, you can start Writing in practice books."

 **Two months later**

"Okay," Yeesha told us, dropping five large books, though the stack was still smaller than the Age Lexicon, "Five practice Books, They're just like normal Books except they're made with normal paper, normal ink, and the Linking Panel is painted on. Fill these out. In one month, we'll start to focus on the one you like most, and eventually put it in a _kormahn._ Now get to work!"

 **One Month Later**

"They're all quite interesting. In fact, they may all be worth Writing. You've selected this one?" Yeesha asked, tapping one of the Practice Books on which we had drawn a winged design.

"Yes, that one."

"Well, get Writing! I'll look over it every other day and point out any major mistakes I can find. Feel free to try and convince me its not a mistake. At first glance, my mother's first Age should have destabilized within minutes, and yet it was one of the most awesome places I have been in the most literal sense of the word. And quite stable too."

 **Only one week later**

"It looks good so far, The thing about starships compressing space to travel faster than light is interesting. Be careful with it, if you don't pay attention to how it interacts with the rest of the Writing you could easily destabilize the Age." Yeesha told us, pushing our _kormahn_ back to us.

"We wanted to show you this too, it's a project we've been working on." We removed a Linking Book from the clip at our hip, about where a D'ni would strap a Book to their belt for emergencies. It had a green cover with a dark red spine and was emblazoned with the word NEXUS in bold golden lettering. "It's an experiment in creating a Linking Book that can travel to multiple Ages. It seems to work well, we haven't had any problems with it."

"A Multibook eh? Many have tried. If you've succeeded you'll be the first. Even I haven't achieved it before." She opened the Book to the first page, which showed a Myst panel. The second showed Releeshahn. The third page was blank, as were all the others. The first two pages also had the symbols of Linking Books on their left sides while the others had the simple blank Panel.

"The best part is adding Ages to it. It can be done in two ways. The first is to simply Write it like any other Book, but the second is to copy an existing Link. It can copy both Descriptive and simple Linking. It also follows the user," We pulled a crystal out of Hammerspace, "Do you have a Linking Book on you?"

Yeesha grabbed a Book from a shelf. "This is one of my spare Relto Books. If you ever need to visit one, it's right here."

We opened the Relto Book and placed our crystal on it and flipped our Nexus to the third page. Pressing a button on the crystal caused it to glow for a second. We then placed the crystal on the Nexus and pressed a second button. The binding symbol appeared on the left side, and when we picked up the crystal, the Panel displayed the same view of Relto.

"Well, the only question is if your Nexus and Relto Book link to the same Relto. Each Book links to its own Age. Something I did shortly after discovering my Grower powers."

"Yeesha, there's something else we've been meaning to ask you. The Red and Blue Books. You've told us that they Linked to prison Ages, but you've told us that in the games," We jerked our head in the direction of a garden shed, where Yeesha kept an Earth computer, along with her other tools, "The Books were a sort of modified Book that trapped the user within the Linking process. How did that work?"

"Cyan couldn't, and wouldn't fit two more Ages on a single CD-ROM. Now get back to work!" The last in a joking tone.

We picked up the Nexus and Linked to Relto, wandered around for five minutes, and Linked back to Releeshahn. We then picked up our Descriptive Book and headed back to our _tomahnah,_ home. In our case this was one of Irras's spare tents at the end of a road. Not particularly comfortable, but beggars can't be choosers. It was furnished simply with a desk and a stool. We liked stools, they didn't get in the way of our tail.

It took us another long while to finish our Age to our satisfaction. A Descriptive Book must describe every aspect of an Age, from the composition of its atmosphere to the depth of its oceans. Ours described a "bubble" of space approximately 10,000 light years across, though not with the detail of any individual planet most Ages would, placing it in the Milky Way galaxy centering around the Sol star system and it's third planet Earth.

 **Six Months Later**

"Well, I don't see any reason it shouldn't be completely stable. You do know that once an Age is entered, it is not recommended to modify the Descriptive Book," Yeesha told us.

"You've told us enough times, We've got our Nexus and we're ready to go." We pulled out our Nexus book and opened it to Releeshahn in case we needed an emergency exit. "If this works, we probably won't be coming back any time soon. Tell Irras he can take his tent back."

"Yes. I was hoping you'd stay, but you have the look… When I saw the look of an adventurer in your eyes, I knew you wouldn't be content to stay in one place too long. I was lucky to have a year to teach you. You are welcome to visit at any time." Yeesha's manner changed from wise teacher to playful friend, "Now go on, get outta here. Go on, have your adventures, if you aren't through that book in ten seconds there's gonna be trouble!"

We rezed in our visor, the clear plexiglass like covering slightly distorting an outside view of our blue and purple face before changing to a translucent red. Our visor changed based on our mood and usage. No visor meant that we felt safe. A clear visor meant we felt somehow threatened, but it wasn't serious. Translucent red meant that there were people nearby that we didn't trust, opaque red was in combat, green was Light Amplification, and blue allowed us to see the full electromagnetic spectrum as opposed to only human visible light. The LA and FS visors were the only colors that had any effect on our visual sensors.

We opened the Descriptive Book to the first page. Yeesha spoke up, "Oh, one last thing, What are you going to name this Age?

We thought for a moment, "...Awakening."

"Awakening… It's a nice name. Why did you choose Awakening, if I may ask?"

"Because during our time here, especially when we were Writing was the first time we felt like we truly knew who we are." Yeesha nodded and we smiled, hovering our hand over the Panel.

"One more thing. One of my father's sayings you should remember no matter how badly things are going or how bleak the future. 'In Books, in Ages, in life, the ending can never truly be written.'" She held up her Ki, "Keep in touch." We lowered our hand.

 **And that's the main plot of this story done. There's one more short arc I want to do before moving on, because the place Composite is going is, while great for a brief arc, isn't really suited for a long story.**

 **Shoutout this chapter goes to Fanfiction writer FourthWallBreaker. FWB's stories, especially the Maria's Adventures series is honestly one of the main reasons I decided to start uploading instead of letting my stories sit in a forgotten corner of my hard drive. FWB's stories are definitely worth reading. There's great characters, environments described much better than mine probably ever will be, and generally very good reading.**

 **When Composite transforms into the Ada form, the animation sequence is one I'm somewhat happy to reveal. Back when I was just starting to discover the internet, there was a series of crossover fan games I really liked. They were called "Final Fantasy Sonic," and while officially were just a Sonic game with a linear storyline and an FF-like battle system, it also seemed to have crossovers from what I now know are Mega Man X/Zero and Legend of Zelda. I didn't play all that much so there's probably more I've never seen. The 10** **th** **game was something special. It was, if I remember correctly, the first non-educational video game I ever encountered with voice acting (and quick time events, though they weren't really so bad in hindsight.) One of the animations that really stuck out was the Heal move. That is the animation that Composite uses to transform from Base to Morph. The animation that they use to return to Base Form is a simple golden aura, usually floating slightly in the air. As it happens, Composite only needs the green energy swirl to morph, but they prefer to use the jump part as well, partially because it makes it that much harder for a large morph to be stuck in a wall, and partly because it looks more impressive.**

 **When Composite is at the radio console testing the buttons, they say they can sense power flowing to the buttons, but they don't light up. This references a feature/glitch in the 1984 and 200 Masterpiece versions where the lights of the buttons light in the correct order even if the antennas are out of alignment. I'm not sure what versions this applies to. I'm pretty sure it works in the 1984 and 2000 releases, but I know it doesn't work in the Steam Masterpiece version. I haven't tested any others.**

 **Previous Myst players will tell me something like "What about Rime and the bad endings?" Well, I'll get to that eventually. Probably post it as an epilogue to this one, as it most certainly won't fit into whatever project I'm currently working on.**

 **Anyhow, I'm certain I've forgotten something I wanted to say, but what the heck, I've got a new arc to write!**

 **Ada Hopper's shirt is real, though it is no longer classified as a munition due to the lifting of trade laws concerning the RSA cypher. Images of the shirt are on the Crypto Wars Wikipedia page. The DES Challenges are documented on the Wikipedia page of the same name. IF you remember back to Chapter 2, Camanion had on a "Talk Nerdy to Me" shirt. This is also real. In fact, unless I say otherwise, it's probably a real shirt. I first heard of the Talk Nerdy to Me shirt in the Cory Doctorow short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," a post-apocalyptic story in which the world is nearly destroyed by a series of opportunistic terrorist attacks, mostly of unknown origin. Not that there's really anyone let to investigate. A very high proportion of the survivors (except China, which is virtually unscathed) are system administrators, simply because they work in large data center buildings that are more locked down than a nuclear bunker. Roughly half of the sysadmins wear t-shirts with slogans related to geek culture in some way. At first I thought they were all fake, but I have seen a Talk Nerdy to Me shirt in person at a Radio Shack. Had I had any money on me it would be hanging in my closet. Like much of Cory Doctorow's work, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth is free for non-commercial uses on his website craphound dot com.**

 **The D'ni Restoration Agency in the Uru games is a group of humans dedicated to the restoration of the D'ni caverns, though not the D'ni culture. Atrus already had that well in hand. They were the driving force behind the Myst games in the Myst universe.**

 **If you know which games I like to play, listed on my profile, you've got a pretty good idea which game Composite is going to next. The key details are starships compressing space and the "bubble" of inhabited space, though Composite described a much larger area than the in-game "bubble," which is a roughly 200 light year diameter cuboid  
**

 **So until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out!**


	11. Awakening Age

**Hello readers, This is SabaraOne. I'm excited to get this arc running. It will probably only be five chapters at most, probably more like three, but I can work with it.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review. I hope this will be interesting!**

 **I'm not yet going to reveal the identity of the game quite yet. That will happen at the end of the chapter.**

 **So, to quote Composite, "Let's make it happen… MAKE IT HAPPEN!"**

 **EDIT: Me and my sleep-deprived self forgot to actually add the separators**

 **EDIT2: Got the year and the spelling of a character's handle wrong.**

 **Chapter 11. Awakening Age.**

* * *

 _How cliché._ We Linked straight into a broom closet. We looked around, switching to Light Amplification on our visuals, dialing down our visor brightness. Not that we felt we needed to, but it seemed like a good idea. The broom closet was simply a broom closet. No indication that it was used for anything else. We immediately flipped our Nexus to a new page and grabbed a quill and ink from Hammerspace. About a month into our time with Yeesha she'd had us doing a bit of "gopher work," in this case making a collection of Linking Books for various Ages to add to the Nexus Age so that they could be accessed by D'ni and humans alike.

The Nexus Age appeared to the user as a single sealed-off room, though it had large storage areas branching off like a spiderweb. It had a beautiful mosaic on the floor, though we couldn't quite remember what. The Nexus consisted of two main parts. The larger were gears with a Book in holders embedded in each tooth in such a way that they could hop from gear to gear. This system was set up to allow for expansion in the future. In theory, an infinite number of gears and Books could be added without needing to make a new machine. The second, much smaller was a bronze console. It was beautifully designed, and had several controls. The main ones included a slot for insertion of a Ki. This authorized the user. The second was a holographic touchscreen used to select the Age the user wanted to travel to, with a large hardware button to confirm the choice. At this point the gears would switch from mindlessly spinning, occasionally swapping Books to ensure the mechanisms continued working and began to purposefully move the requested Book to the console. The holder would flop out and the Book would fall open to the Linking Panel. After the user Linked out, the book would close and be pulled back into the next empty holder, when the Nexus would resume standby operations.

The Nexus was free for both human and D'ni use, and on occasion members of the two species would encounter each other. These meetings were usually cordial or even downright friendly, though the two peoples rarely deliberately sought each other out. The D'ni were happy to let the humans have the old caverns, and the humans were usually happy to let the strange recluses keep their solitude.

Our Nexus had a new Link established to Awakening within two minutes. We had made so many Linking Books that we could make them in a matter of moments, even when running in low-speed operations. We honestly didn't know how wetware programs could stand moving so slowly, usually taking full seconds to complete even basic thoughts!

The first thing we noticed about our environment was that the gravity was a little different. _Must be on a station._ The space stations in our Age either had no gravity or rotated to create a standard Earth-like gravitational field through centrifugal force at the rim. We were in roughly 0.5G so we assumed we were roughly halfway from the rim to the 0G docking bays. We decided to morph into Ada so as to not alarm the wetware inhabitants.

We stepped out of the closet and were quickly absorbed into the bustle of a busy starport. We noticed a clock reading

 **00:01 June 20, 3302 CE**

This told us when we were. The same board read

 **Bugov Dock, Laksak System**

 **-21.53125/-6.3125/116.03125**

 _And that's where._ Below this was a long list of trade items, their buy and sell prices, the supply and demand, and the galactic average for the given items. They were in many categories ranging from chemicals to machines to foods and legal drugs. We looked at a large view port simulating a window, showing a large vista of a brown, lifeless rock of a planet with white polar icecaps. A display next to the "view port" proclaimed it to be Laksak A 4, a solid rocky planet with a nitrogen based atmosphere.

A sign under the trade data pointed to a hallway reading "New Pilots Here." We made our way along the crowded atrium-like area. Down the hall led to a room with more people, all human except somebody's pet dog, in which was a single kiosk labeled "Pilots Federation Sign-Up."

The kiosk had a form on which was a cover letter reading

 **Welcome Future Pilots,**

 **Welcome to the Pilots Federation. The Pilots Federation is a group of pilots across the galaxy. We are a loose-knit organization, passively observing and rewarding the achievements of pilots. We do not award pilots based on morals, only on skills. The purpose of the Pilots Federation is to give budding pilots the tools they need to attain money, power, and prestige in the galaxy. New pilots are given a free stock Sidewinder, transportation to the nearest station with these ships available, and a small credit balance to use as they see fit. There are no strings attached to this free ship, no commitments, no penalties.**

 **Welcome:**

 **The Pilots Federation**

Below this letter was a box titled simply NAME. We entered "Ada Hopper" and tapped Submit.

 **Thank You!**

 **There are three free Sidewinders at your current location. Press your right hand on the screen to recognize your hand print.**

In a case of forethought, we had given Ada unique handprints. We placed our right hand on the large on-screen rectangle.

 **Locked. Your ship is in docking bay 37.**

A map appeared below this, and a slot on the kiosk ejected a device resembling a data pad of some sort. It projected a map of the station identical to the one on the kiosk. The map moved as we moved, and allowed us to select destinations and automatically plot the fastest route. We followed it, eventually ending up in front of an airtight hanger bay door. We palmed it open and entered, seeing our ship. It was a delta-shaped vessel, cut off in front, with three landing clamps extended to the hanger bay deck. We entered through a hatch in the back. We briefly walked through a hallway into an airtight door separating the cockpit from the rest of the ship. The cockpit had a variety of buttons and displays in front of a canopy with a nice synthetic leather chair. We reverted to base form and attempted to sit down. We had, of course, reprogrammed our Base Form hands to have the same handprints as Ada.

 _This just won't do!_ We thought, looking at the chair, which definitely had no tail hole. _Well, how should we fix this… Forget it, let's just do this the easy way. It's been far too long since we had a chance to give a good TK blast._ We turned to sit down. Using a technique we had learned of in one of Irras's entertainment films, we telekinetically started to vibrate our tail at a frequency that would cut most materials. Once our tail was vibrating at the right frequency and speed, we plunged the tip into the seat back. It slipped through like a knife through butter, and we waved our tail around a bit to enlarge the hole. _There, that's better,_ we thought, allowing our tail to return to its usual motion pattern, identical to Camanion's as it happened.

Once we were settled, we placed our hands on the controls. The ship started to purr softly as it powered up. "Main systems… Online" announced a standard feminine AI voice, decidedly not Risa's. "Welcome Commander. Please enter the name you wish to use in the spaceways," A box appeared over the canopy HUD along with a virtual keyboard. We typed in the name _Composite._ "Welcome Commander Composite. Would you like to run a series of training simulations to teach you the basics of controlling your vessel?" We tapped yes on the resulting box. The simulations taught us many useful things, including targeting, weapons fire, fire groups, sensors, docking, intersystem and intrasystem navigation, and docking/launching procedures for large orbital stations, small orbital outposts, surface outposts, and planetary surfaces. After these were completed the ship returned to its standard configuration.

At this point the main menu for station controls appeared on our HUD. It had the name of the station, Bugoy Dock, the current time and date, and three options; Starport Services, Return to Surface, and Launch. We opened up Starport Services. The Starport HUD appeared on our display, containing many options and statistics including repair, refuel, and rearm, ship outfitting, the shipyard, the mission board, and the commodities market. We opened up the mission board. There was one mission we could complete, delivering one ton of scrap metal to a station two systems over. It paid roughly 10,000 credits, to deliver 250 credits worth of scrap for about another 200 credits worth of fuel. _Who are we to say no?_ It had a time limit of six hours. We accepted the mission and used the loading time productively setting our course. At best speed it would take us two hyperspace jumps. So, left hand on throttle, right hand on flight stick, we selected the Launch option. The ship AI announced "Warning: Bay depressurizing. All internal hatches sealed automatically." The cockpit door slid shut automatically _Not very useful for us, but it is safer for the wetwares._ We wondered at the lack of any non-humans on the station. It was a puzzle we didn't have time to explain yet. We had no clue how long the jumps would take. A list of controls appeared on our HUD for the preflight checklist all new pilots were required to complete before launching. This covered such controls as throttle, pitch, roll, and yaw, being the X, Y and Z axis respectively, primary and secondary fire, retracting/extending weapon hardpoints, and lateral thrusters. The top of the hanger pad, which was in front and above our ship, dropped down about a meter before sliding back, revealing the top of the station hanger. We diverted our ships power to engines, a system we noted had a definite similarity to our power system, which we had set to full cognition, and thrusted upward and rolling our ship in-line with the blue exit to the station hanger. It was a narrow slit, just tall enough for the largest ships to enter. Our Sidewinder glided out of the hanger in textbook fashion. Surprised at our near-instantaneous skill, we quickly scanned our code. Apparently Fcon had programmed us to be able to control any vehicle nearly instinctively. Useful.

We retracted our landing gear and checked our compass. The target vector for our first jump was behind us, slightly low and to the right. We spun our ship around, throttling down to the halfway mark for best turning efficiency before opening wide, using the afterburners for better acceleration, and to get us away from the station faster. Its mass was keeping us from activating our Frame Shift Drive. We glanced at our fuel gauge, telling us that this jump would take approximately a quarter of our available fuel. No big loss. The ship chirped at us, telling us that we were out of mass lock. We activated the FSD. "Frame Shift Drive Charging..." After about five seconds the charging bar at the top of our HUD changed to a countdown while the starfield in front of us started to crackle as our drive started to compress local space for the inter-system jump. "Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Engage." We were pressed back into our seat as the inertial compensator failed to keep up with the demand. The hole in the starfield at the center of our canopy expanded, engulfing our ship. Streaks and clouds of light shot past us as we blazed down a dark tunnel.

After about ten seconds, the starfield exploded back into being around us. "You are now in supercruise" announced the AI. _Someday we'll make you sentient_ we thought. The supercruise field was similar to the normal starfield, though it had a slight blue tint. We pulled back on our stick, avoiding crashing into the local star, a yellow main sequence. Our FSD went into a ten second cooldown before we could make another hyperspace jump. No problem, while a supercruise jump could be made in nearly any direction, hyperspace required the ship to aim at the target. We suspected that hyperspace navigation consisted of 1. Aim at star, 2. Engage FSD in hyperspace mode, 3. Wait until pulled out by stellar gravity. Not that it really mattered. We were pressed back into our seat again as the drive kicked into high gear. _Ludicrous speed!_ We thought, remembering another of Irras's vids. We emerged, pulling away from the star with half our fuel tank empty. _One full ton of hydrogen… two hundred credits_ Our comms system chirped. We glanced up and slightly left, activating the comms panel. We had a message from the woman who had given us the mission. We could get an extra 5000 for getting it in within the next thirty minutes. We pointed at the target outpost and opened the throttle. Four minutes later, we were approaching the planet the outpost orbited. We decelerated smoothly, reaching the required 1 megameter per second just before getting within the required one megameter of the station. A blue box at the bottom of our display read "Safe disengage ready." We deactivated our FSD, dropping our ship from supercruise within ten kilometers of the outpost. After closing to the regulation 7.5 km, we looked at the left hand panel and selected the Contacts pane from the choices, displaying three sensor contacts, two other ships and the station. We selected the station and selected "Request Docking" from the menu that appeared. "Docking Request Granted" announced the AI. At three kilometers we oriented to the docking bay we were allocated. At 1500 meters, we dropped our gear. At two hundred we flipped belly down and made our final decent. Textbook.

We immediately opened up the mission board and signed the order as completed, with twenty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds until the bonus offer expired. Our account balance rose by 15000 credits. We refueled and went about our business.

* * *

"I'm telling you, there are ghost ships out there! I was cruising through Wolf 359 when one of them interdicted me from SC and told me to drop my cargo! It was an Anaconda, so of course I obeyed. My Type-7 couldn't have taken ten seconds of fire from that monster!" A drunk bar patron slurred emphatically at us. We were in our Ada form, nursing an ale. Alcohol gave us no benefit, not even the self-destructive "benefits" it seemed to give wetwares, but buying something expensive kept the staff from complaining. We had quickly learned that there were better jobs to be found in bars than on the boards.

"Aw shut up," yelled over a female pilot, "He's been going on about this all night!"

"But I swear on my name! I saw a ghost ship! It stole my cargo and Shifted out!" He made a next-round gesture at the barkeep. "I checked later. It was definitely real, it was on my logs! It had a strange name… CMDR somethn'."

"I believe you," we said, using the singular pronouns because plural drew too much attention, "Did you notice anything else?"

"Yeah," he started flailing his arms around, probably trying to illustrate some point, but only managing to spill his drink, "Blast Refill. So as I was sayn,' yeah, you better believe I noticed the five beam lasers, five microcannons, two missile launchers, and a torpedo pylon pointed at me!"

"Of course it was just a ship with a weird name! We all get to pick the names we go by when we start in the PF!" the skeptical woman shot back, rather coherently considering the six drinks she had consumed.

"Did you notice anything else, maybe something about the pilot or comms patterns?" we asked the drunk.

"Yeah, he didn't associate with any pirate group. Said somthn' like 'Drop your cargo right criffn' now or I'll blow your _shebs_ back Fousang!' No idea what that one word meant, but it probably wasn't friendly! I dumped my cargo and watched him pick it up. Didn't even have the decency to pick it up himself, got a blasted Limpet to do it for him! Lost me six hundred grand that did! And the strangest thing was, I flew near his ship, looked right in his cockpit… It was empty. One of the seats was active, but the chair was empty! I saw the controls moving on their own! Refill." He promptly slumped over and landed on the floor with a thump.

"You don't actually believe him do you?" asked the skeptic.

"Yes, yes I do. And I've got some theories what these 'Ghost Ships' might be."

"And what'sat?" she asked, now on her eighth drink.

"Users."

"Uzhers? What's a uzer?"

"something related to my… upbringing, you could say." we responded. We pulled a credit chip from our belt and programmed it for a good fifty before slipping it into the drunk man's shirt pocket. One of the bouncers dragged him to one of the rooms they kept for guests who didn't pay for a room but needed one anyway. 'Course it was basically a room with a cot, sink, and toilet. We paid for our drink and left. We'd have to find one of these so-called "Ghost ships." A wetware program from another dimension would be able to tell us plenty of useful information. It hadn't gone unnoticed by us that our name also started with a CMDR. We wondered why ours did when none of the other programs from this dimension did.

* * *

"Welcome Composite, You have mail" announced the AI as we entered the cockpit of our Adder multipurpose vessel, which turned out to be a notification of our promotion to Peddler trade rank. We had modified our new ship with a better FSD, top of the line shields and a high-end shield booster, military-grade armor, more cargo space, high end weapons, two small gimbled beam lasers and a medium gimbled multicannon, top of the line power plant, thrusters, and power distributor. It also had a planetary vehicle bay with a single Scarab-class Surface Reconnaissance Vehicle, which was very fun to drive on low gravity planets. We'd heard there were new SRV models coming out soon, but we sure didn't have one. We almost had enough credits to buy a Cobra Mk. III and still keep a good safety cushion. We had heard that there was good money to be had selling medical diagnostic equipment in the Sol area. We didn't have clearance to enter Sol itself, but Alpha Centaur i had good money for anyone with diagnostic equipment in the hold, at which point authorized traders would finish the job for an even higher profit, but that wasn't our problem. We made three jumps past two red giants and a neutron star before encountering a main sequence. Our fuel scoop came online with a _swoosh_ and we skimmed the corona of the star, collecting hydrogen to refill our tanks. After dropping off our cargo we flew to the Eravate system, specifically Cleve Hub, where we knew Cobras were on a good price. We came in to dock, and as was our custom, checked out the programs in the area. Two names caught our attention. CMDR OneTail and CMDR Turing. _These must be Ghost Ships!_ We had previously encountered a ghost pirate, but he hadn't been willing to have a conversation. He had just replied with "I don't talk to NPCs, give me your cargo." He was an overconfident squirt with a souped up Sidewinder. Had he been paying attention he would have found out he was over matched before making his final mistake. Once his ship was destroyed we were awarded with a 10,000 credit bounty voucher. This was how we normally got these vouchers. We had noticed the ejector seat making an emergency jump to what was presumably the last station he had docked at. Though this was pointless if the "Ghost ships" really were users, as they'd only get angry.

But these two names rang a bell… OneTail… Turing…

 **[DIRECT][to:OneTail]: Hey OneTail, are you who we think you are?**

 **[OneTail invited to group comms]**

 **[GROUP][from:Turing]: By Sajuuk, Composite, is that really you? It's us…**

* * *

 **And that's the first chapter of the Elite arc. Yes, Composite is in Elite: Dangerous. I'll admit I got the initial writing done on Monday night… (and a bit Tuesday morning.) Unfortunately for me, I'm currently in a place where the Wi-Fi is practically non-existent. Plus I make a practice of not making midnight uploads. I wonder who those two Users are…? Spoiler alert, it's Camanion and Risa. Camanion's handle of OneTail is obvious enough, but Risa's is a bit harder. I'll let her explain it next chapter. Sajuuk, who Risa references at the end of the chapter is a deity from the Homeworld series of 3D Real Time Strategy games, one of, if not the only, to allow for virtually unrestricted movement in all three dimensions. 2D RTS seems a lot less rewarding to me than it probably could… Probably because I really started playing RTS with Homeworld.**

 **I mentioned last chapter that Composite's morph animation is based on the heal move from a Sonic JRPG fan game. I'll probably have to retcon some parts of it as I haven't played in at least two years, so I probably got the sequence wrong.**

 **Composite mentions they can't quite remember the Nexus's mosaic floor. That's because I can't and Myst Online: Uru Live is a royal pain to get working on modern systems. Hopefully Composite doesn't suddenly get a fuzzy memory in whatever dimension they inhabit. In all honesty, I don't know weather or not I** _ **want**_ **Composite to exist in a parallel universe.**

 _ **Shebs**_ **is a Mandolorian curse in the Star Wars: Legends time line. I'll let you figure out what it means.** **EDIT: I checked, and apparently I spelled it right on the first try. I'm good with curses and battlecries.**

 **Shoutout this chapter goes to… uh… wow, I'm really unprepared. Uh… Tom Clancy. Yeah, he'll do. The late Tom Clancy was a very famous author of military thrillers, in fact nearly single-handedly inventing the military thriller genre, notably the novel** **Hunt for Red October** **. Yeah, I've been playing way too much Splinter Cell recently…**

 **Anyhow, until next chapter, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out.**

 **The grammar mistake in the user quote is intentional. It's not that unlike things I've said over text chat, though I'm a merchant, not a pirate.  
**


	12. Return of the Sources

**Hello readers, this is SabaraOne back for another chapter.**

 **Thanks to FourthWallBreaker for the review. That… Is exactly the advice I needed. I'll see what I can do! Sometimes it just takes the right thing said the right way. As for long paragraphs, you should see my original Risa Star Wars fic! Its got five chapters… And five paragraphs totaling about the length of one of my shorter puzzle chapters, but probably longer than Stoneship. Myst's tech was pretty easy to describe, after all, the Books look just like any old book when closed. Except of course their ornate libraries.**

 **I've also discovered that I've got my ED year wrong by several hundred years. I'll have that fixed in Chapter 11 by the time I get this one up.**

 **The chapter title "Return of the Sources" references, of course, the fact that it marks the return of Composite's wetware and software source programs to the writing.**

 **Chapter 12: Return of the Sources**

* * *

"Pay up Turring. I told you they'd be all right." OneTail told Turring.

"No, you said they'd be derezed." Risa shot back to Camanion

"Want me to check the camera logs?"

"What camera logs? You don't allow cameras!"

"I do allow my webcam when making a verbal contract."

"Verbal contracts are worth the paper they're written on," Risa argued.

"Or the drive they're recorded on." Camanion countered. "Oh, I'm forgetting my manners!" [Invited to Wing]

We accepted the Wing request, enabling direct voice communications. "Is this who we think you are?"

Camanion's voice came over the line, "Yup, I'd recognize your voice anywhere. You like my Cobra Mk IV?"

"Yeah, we like it, what you packing?" We looked at the ship. It had a shape not unlike the sidewinder. From the top it looked like an equilateral triangle with the sides cut off slightly, the front much more so than the sides. The ship was red with white stripes. Its hull design had it with roughly one third the ship at its full 8.6 meters high, wedging both up and down to points at the edges. It had a cockpit canopy in the middle about halfway down the front slant. We could see two medium hardpoints for weapons between the cockpit and the front and three small hardponts on the flat top. The two utility mounts held a shield booster and some sort of scanner. The ship measured a total of 33.1 meters long by 48.1 meters wide and 8.6 meters high with hardpoints retracted. _210 tons of rude awakening._

"Military-Grade Composites, full 4A core, except Life Support, which is only a 3D. It gives me a good seven minutes on failure, so I don't need better, and being a D rating it has the lowest mass which adds… about five percent of a light year to my jump range. All the cargo racks have been upgraded to full spec, except I removed one of the 4 classes to make room for a fuel scoop. I also replaced the Basic Discovery scanner with an advanced model and the class 2 cargo rack with an SRV hanger with one Scarab. Gives me two sixteen and two eight ton racks totaling… 48 tons of cargo. I also replaced the E4 shield generator with an A4 model. The utilities are an A rank shield booster and an A rank Kill Warrant Scanner. Some idiot interdicts me from Supercruise and I can check the Galnet database for bounties in any jurisdiction in about ten seconds, as opposed to just the ones in the current system. For weapons I've got three small beam lasers, gimbled because turrets are a pain to use. The medium hardpoints are gimbled miniguns - I mean microcannons, though how they work without compressed oxygen to push out the bullets is beyond me. Maybe they use magnetic acceleration? I've got no idea. It's much better in combat than Risa's… emm… 'ship'."

"And what do you have?" we asked, directing the question at Risa. No response. Camanion cleared her throat loudly and there was the distinct clang of a program suddenly deciding to move a half-ton piece of equipment with their head. And failing.

"Sorry, Was docking in low priority, mostly focusing on replacing the backplane of this VAX 11/780. Why do you even keep this piece of junk anyway?" Risa excused.

"It was the first machine I administered. Bought it off the company for ten grand when the company upgraded to something that wasn't released when my parents hadn't even met. That's why I keep it around. Now answer Composite's question, what're your specs?"

"Operating hardware at 1 Terrabyte of ram, the most the processor of my primary host can hand-"

"No, your brick." Camanion reprimanded.. Brick was right, Risa piloted a Type-7 class medium freighter. It was 81.6 meters long, 56.1 meters wide and 25.4 meters high weighing in at 420 tons for a base model with 104 tons of cargo capacity. It looked like a brick with its subway car like shape, though the brick image was broken by a pair of stubby wings at the lower back. It had a pair of small hardpoints mounted beside the cockpit, probably visible from the inside, and two more, one on the top middle and one on the bottom moddle totaling four small hardpoints. The utility mounts were on the top and bottom, left and right back, top and bottom lining up perfectly. The mounts seemed to be a shield booster in the top left, a point defense turret on the top right, a chaff launcher on the bottom left, and a heat sink launcher on the bottom right. It had a utilitarian gray paint job.

"Core is the same as Camanion's, straight A's except life support. Brought the cargo racks to full spec because Lakon always ships them with the racks one class below max. Gives me two by 64 and 32 for a total of 192 tons. The shield generator is top of the line A4, and I slapped an Auto Field Maintenance Unit in the empty class 2 slot so I can repair my hull and modules on the go. It's not cheap, but it works. Replaced the BDS with a 2A fuel scoop so I can top off the gas. I've got a Cobra 4 same as Camanion's except the BDS was replaced with an AFM unit because I'm not as good at combat, so I tend to take more hits. My freighter has two front mounted small microcannons, gimbled of course, and a pair of turreted beamers. It's not great in a fight, but at least it doesn't break. I've also got a similar type-6 light freighter because this beast can't dock at outposts, and any planet over about half a G is out of the question. Has 96 tons and a better jump range. Good enough I don't need the scoop, though it still looks like a brick. More actually since it doesn't have wings.. All my ships have military grade armor. It's _really_ expensive for a T7. Worth it though." Risa spilled, talking far too fast for wetware comprehension.

"Why don't you have a discovery scanner?" We asked

"Cartographic data automatically syncs with wingmates. And we never play alone."

"I hope you aren't telling them _all_ my secrets," Camanion butted in.

Risa resumed a wetware talk rate, "Nope, not at all. Just telling the specs!"

Camanion grunted disbelievingly. "Look sharp, we've got a new mission. Evil corporation, CEO on unguarded transport, six hours, one jump. Let's do it."

We spoke up. "You'll never guess where we were for the last year."

"Year?" Camanion responded incredulously, "It's only been, what? Two, three weeks? Though from what I've heard temporal rate shifts are common between dimensions. Speaking of which, where were you?"

"Put it to you this way, our current dimension is Awakening, our first Age."

"Myst!? Get out! I love those old games! Did you meet Atrus?" Camanion asked, accompanied by the distinctive sound of a microphone being swatted in genuine annoyance.

"Or Ti'ana? Or Catherine?" added Risa.

"No, just Yeesha and Irras Jr. Atrus had died of old age," we responded, explaining at the same time the death of Yeesha's mother Catherine, or Katran, as she had been called on her home Age of Riven, and a member of a shorter-lived people than the D'ni, and even quarter D'ni such as Atrus. We hadn't probed for details because both her parents' deaths were clearly sensitive topics for Yeesha. Of course, it also explained the death of Ti'ana, Atrus's grandmother who had been fully human. Yeesha had never met her.

"You Wrote an age there? Sounds like you had fun," Camanion said enviously, "I can read and write common D'ni, basically anyone who still plays Myst probably will, but I couldn't Write an Age even if I had the special paper and ink. Risa doesn't play the games, but she does know all the official lore and most of the fan-created. Anyway, evil corporation time. Looking at your stats, this should bump you just high enough to enlist in the Federation Navy. You don't seem to have had any impact on the Empire or the Alliance."

"Yeah, we've been hanging out in Federation and independent space mostly." We responded.

"Risa! Cobra now! Composite! Cobra! Ten minutes!"

* * *

Ten minutes later we had transferred our boot-shaped Adder's weapons to a sparkling new Cobra Mk III. Most of its specs were better than the Adder's. Its armor was slightly lower., but only because we were using the stock Lightweight Alloys Outside of weapons though, it was stock. Running a few missions with Risa and Camanion would quickly get us up to speed. We had jumped to the system where the target was traveling. The Cobra Mk III looked almost identical to Camanion and Risa's Mk IVs except that it had a blue and white instead of red and white color, one fewer component bay, two small hardpoints under the cockpit on the far left and right, and was faster and more maneuverable.

"Okay. We're looking for an unidentified signal source. Scanning it should tell us if it's the right one. Composite! Pay attention!. I'm recommending full power to weapons, thermals in fire group one primary and kinetics in secondary. Hit him with your beams until his shields go down, then go to multicannons. I'm giving you 50% of the cash and all the loot this mission and you'd better be worth it… Target! Lock on my navicomputer and stick with me, We're dropping out together. Composite, you'll go under him, come up and around, then come down. Keep the fire on. I'll take front and back, Risa you tak-"

"LEEROY JENKINS!" cried out Risa, shooting into position and dropping into battle.

Camanion sighed, "At least she only does this when she knows she can win"

We dropped out with Camanion to see Risa flying against a Vulture fighter. "Stock" was all she had to say. While the vulture was extremely powerful, its default loadout was decidedly not optimal. With a pair of fixed small pulse lasers its firepower was negligible.

"Take it rookie! Risa, pull out!"

Within five minutes the almost soap bar shaped fighter was a cloud of dust and black market fodder. Ten minutes after that our wing had returned to Cleve Hub, an Orbis station with a long central "hub" with solar arrays sticking from it and a large two-spoked wheel in the front, where the airlock was. We slipped in and touched down perfectly. Camanion glided over top of her pad, slid back and to the right a little, and dropped down, landing gear deploying during the drop. A dangerous maneuver, but undeniably fun to watch and even more so to perform. Risa hit her afterburners going into the airlock, bounced off one of the landing pads, hooked her nose on one of the antennae, spun out, and eventually limped much slower than necessary to her slip.

* * *

"Hey Risa, what does your handle mean?" We asked in genuine curiosity.

"Turing? Allan Turing was the man who pretty much invented computers as we know them. He also created the Turing test, the criteria by which the determination as to weather an artificial intelligence is sentient is made. Because of this, Camanion dubbed me to be a 'Turing class AI.' I'm the first and so far only one of my kind. At least in my dimension, though there are many semi-sentient programs on the net." Risa told us. "Turing was also known for his work breaking the Nazi Enigma cypher during World War II. Unfortunately for him, he was homosexual in the mid 1900s, and so the British government shot him full of hormones to cure it and he killed himself."

"Homosexual? Hormones?" We asked.

"Biological differences concerning reproduction, considered anomalous or outright bad by many. I'm sure Fcon engineered such urges from you. Couldn't have their ultimate weapon struck down by a mere reproductive cycle, now could they?" We got the impression that Risa was giving her hand a dismissive wave, a mannerism we had as well.

"Speaking of which, I just sliced into Fcon and stole all the data on Project Shockwave, the project that lead to your creation." Camanion said, "The problem will be getting it to you. I don't have a convenient link to your ship's data systems like I do with the Fcon network. I've written a program that should help that compiles to half a kilobyte so that I can send you a real transfer program. It's in hex though, I programmed it for your architecture. I'll read it out to you whenever you're ready. Plus you never sent me that PRod program."

"What do you want with it?" We asked

"A network operator never gives up a chance to get a better cattleprod, even if she never uses it, or even plans to. As far as I know, the Rod Primitive is the most powerful cattleprod in the multiverse," Camanion responded, "Anyway, Zero, X-ray, Epsilon 3, 5, Delta…"

* * *

It took Camanion about an hour and a half to dictate the program to us. The program was, however, successful in allowing us to recieve a larger program that enabled file, audio, and video communication without routing through our ship.

"This is a lot of data. I'm just warning you. Among other things it's got a complete Mobian genome, mine of course, and the complete Turing AI source, including all modifications to the DNA and codes they made. Honestly, I'd be surprised if your biological elements were capable of reporduction with other Mobians, they've been modified so much. Though the Turing AI code they have isn't not Risa's specific code. That's on my secure network." Camanion told us.

"Secure network?"

"No connection to the outside world. All data transfers go through the semi-secure machine, which is connected either to the internet, or to the secure network, but never both. I set it up so that it is physically impossible to connect both cables without doing some major disassembly, which is bound to get noticed. Three wrong password attempts and it locks out so completely that I have to use the external hard drive in my Hammerspace to reopen it. Any unauthorized devices, be they a cellular adapter or a flash drive on the secure network shuts down all machines on it, and blows at least three fuses. The machines themselves are in a secure location, and any unrecognized person in the area sets off an alarm and activates an electrical paralysis trap until the force fields come online, and only shut down both if given an order to in my or Risa's voice _and_ the one doing the ordering is in the secure room. It identifies both of us using iris scan, handprint scan, passcodes based on a time-based token that changes every thirty seconds, and visual appearance. It identifies me by DNA and Risa by serial number. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. That simple."

"We could probably break it."

"With your powers? Of course you could! You could, just off the top of my head, go into the door access system on one side and come out the other, absorb the electric trap, silence the alarms, and enter the secure network from inside the room. Or you could enter the Airlock machine when it was connected to the internet, wait for it to go to the secure network, dodging my home-brew antivirus programs, which are far more advanced than anything on the market, and then get into the secure machines. And it's not no stinkn' M&M security either, pure defense in depth, each layer of machines more heavily secured than the last, No hard-shell soft inside for me!"

"Sounds tough." We deadpanned.

"You bet it is! Now, as I was saying, they did get the Makefile that contained several of the aesthetic and personality settings Risa has, but not the customized code that makes her so much more powerful than the stock Turing. Not that there are any stock Turings,I was planning to release the code in a couple months under a Free Software license, so that anybody could use it for whatever reason, so long as they credit me with the original code and give others the same rights. Anyway, I found something interesting concerning your immunity to mind control. Apparently, among other things, your Mobian brain was cybernetically enhanced so that it can ooperate at the same clock speed as your AI self, your "Ghost in the Wires," as it were," Camanion and Risa laughed at this. We didn't know why, but we got the impression the joke wasn't at our expense, "Anyway, one advantage of this is that both of your minds are constantly syncing and self-correcting. If a psychic attacker were, for example, to attempt to control your wetware mind, within nanoseconds your software mind would detect and correct the change. And the same goes in reverse. Fcon actually didn't try and control your mind so much as to inject a backdoor so they could inject mission parameters into your mind. They also didn't want to have someone like ENCOM scum reprogramming you for good, so they implemented the sync system."

"So how does this explain the fact that we aren't a mindless Fcon drone?" we asked, making a get-to-the-point gesture.

"Actually you'd be more like a Daemon viral, but that's beside the point. As it happens, a couple of the cowboys they had working as contractors activated the sync before initializing the primary consciousness. I think one of them was called Renalds. I hope Fcon didn't do what they usually do to people who cross them if my reading of their internal memos can be believed. Anyway, the program couldn't be uploaded until you were awake. Not sure why. And the rest is history." Camanion continued.

"Daemon Viral?"

Risa chimed in, "Old 90's cartoon reference. Show called Reboot, look it up. Long story short, you'd be the same as you are personality-wise, but you'd be absolutely devoted to Fcon's goals, even at the cost of your deresolution."

"But we don't have access to what you would call the inter… We're stupid sometimes." We tunneled our active network connection through the data link, testing the links before returning our attention to the conversation.

"Anyway, you signing up for the Fed navy willingly? Or do I have to drag you into the office by your bootheels?" Camanion piped up.

"Checking the mission board now… Rapid data transport as a promotion opportunity… Ready to launch?"

"Go!" Risa and Camanion said at the same time.

"Lock on with your navcomps, We're not slowing down."

* * *

It took half an hour to do the round trip carrying five tons of hydrogen fuel four systems over. Camanion asked "How does it feel to be in the navy, Recruit Composite?"

"Same as usual, Cadet OneTail"

"Touche, Composite."

We changed the subject, "So, what you said about mission parameters earlier?"

"Oh, simple. When you set mission parameters, you are bound to complete the mission by any means necessary short of betraying your friends. Fcon wouldn't want you to turn on them if you somehow convinced yourself that destroying them would be the best way to achieve their world domination. Not sure that would happen, but there's always the possibility."

"Hey, We just leveled up to 'Mostly Harmless' in the Pilot's Federation combat ranks." We announced as a new mail dropped in our inbox.

"Install the decal," said Risa, "Outfitting under Livery. Even us users don't have to buy decals. Just paint jobs and bobbleheads. That's why we sport the default paints."

"Hey Risa, you hungry?"Camanion asked suddenly.

"I'm an AI, I don't need food." Risa said in the tone reserved for young children and users who have asked why they can't install a known virus onto their work computer for the dozenth time. We had spent a full three minutes reading tech support stories piggybacking off of Camanion's internet connection.

"Be rude not to ask!" Camanion cried cheerfully, tossing a headset onto her desk and whirling her chair around before shooting out of her gaming room and around a hallway corner. She had added us to her camera feed so that all three of us could see the others.

"Why does she always ask that?" Risa asked to nobody in particular.

"Probably to annoy you."

"I know, I know," Risa said, waving her hand at us in a slightly chastising fashion. "It just bugs me, that's all."

[OneTail has left the wing]

A message titled "Friend Request from Turing" popped into our inbox.

"I've sent you a friend request on my end. It will allow us to message from long distance and to easily locate each other on the galaxy map. I've gotta go finish maintenance on this piece of jumk Camanion keeps around. I heard her muttering something about a computer history museum once. Not sure what about. Anyway, Camanion will be _really_ annoyed if I don't get this done."

[Turing has left the wing]

* * *

 **So, how was that? I hope I did okay at describing the ships. Feel free to tell me if I didn't. I'm currently sitting in my "office" (which is definitely not just a spare room with all my kit slapped haphazardly in,) waiting for the idiots next door to either get bored with the fireworks or to blow themselves up. Doesn't matter to me.**

 **Shoutout this week goes to, who else, Sonic the Hedgehog. On June 23, 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis hit stores in America and Europe. Strangely enough (unless the STH pages on both Wikipedia and the Sonic News Network are being hit with a very targeted campaign of vandalism,) this was just over a month before the Japanese release. I actually forgot about this except one of my friends, who is even more of a Sonic fan then I am, surprisingly enough, told me about it by kicking me off one of the public computer so she could watch Sonic Colors videos on YouTube. I didn't care all that much because all my best games were on my laptop. I was planning to get off soon and spend the next few hours bashing splicers anyway.**

 **Just replayed the Sonic JRPG fan game that Composite's morph move is based on, Final Fantasy Sonic X 6. Took me a while to find it because I got it into my head it was X 10. Ah well, at least I found it. Plus the heal move Composite's morph is based on looks even better than I remember. As a bonus, the guy voicing Sonic does a pretty good job, though Shadow's actor isn't all that great. He's better than the one in the new official cast though.**

 **The biggest technical problem I have with writing is that I'm too cheap to buy MS Office, so I use Libreoffice instead. The problem with that is that Libreoffice (which doesn't recognize its own name in spellcheck apparently) saves in a varient of DOCX that is** _ **just**_ **different enough that FF barfs on it, so I have to convert to its native format ODT. I don't normally use ODT because most of the people I send files to require DOCX. Just a mild annoyance.**

 **Camanion's landing is my normal method, though I have pulled a few of Composite's, and one time I did pull Risa's landing. It wasn't at Cleve, but it was at Russel Ring, a fellow Orbis starport in the Eravate system a few planets from Cleve. As I recall, I was going because it had a good supply of mining equipment. And I didn't even get a reckless piloting fine!  
**

 **Next chapter will be less interaction and more action. I'm probably going to prepare by re-reading a few of the Star Wars X-Wing books. But only because they've got excellent starfighter dogfight scenes, and definitely not because X-Wing is my favorite of the Star Wars Legends books outside of the Legacy era. I honestly haven't read any of the new Cannon. I should get around to that.**

 **Risa's name is pronounced wiht a short /i/ sound, not a long /e/ sound like most text-to-speech programs read it.  
**

 **As always, I'm certain there's something I forgot to say, but until next time this is SabaraOne, logging out!**

 **And I'm gonna break my rule about midnight uploads because I've read it about three times in the last hour and it seems fine!**

 **EDIT: I did really well on grammar and spelling, only one mistake this time!**


	13. Battle

**Hello readers, this is SabaraOne and happy 4th of July! I'm currently celebrating my independence by being told to reinstall Windows on a relative's laptop despite my protests that a proper Linux install would be much better. Anyway, while this CRITICAL PRIORITY 0 DON'T EVEN USE THE BATHROOM install is happening, I have a lot of spare time while I wait for the progress bar to do something interesting. So I'll write.**

 **Sorry I've been a bit slow (Which by my standards is actually pretty fast but that's beside the point,) with that last chapter, but Steam summer sale.**

 **Chapter 12: Battle**

* * *

We flew into the mailbox at Russel Ring and docked perfectly. Our Cobra powered down with a rapidly descending hum as the landing gear and the station's automated systems rotated our ship over three degrees into perfect alignment. The station services hologram appeared on our controls and we selected the option to enter the hanger and refuel. In the outfitting panel, we ordered that our ship be installed with military grade armors to replace our hardened alloy bulkheads. It was the last upgrade our Cobra Mk III needed. Risa and Camanion decided to open comms then.

"...So Risa, you want to have an RC drone race later?" Camanion finished whatever she had been saying. This was perfectly normal for her. She'd open communication links and then continue with whatever discussion she'd been having.

"Isn't it illegal for an AI to control a drone?" Ris asked

"I checked. The rules only have anything about on board autopilot. Nothing about an external AI controlling it."

"Hey, Risa, Camanion. There's a big battle going on ten jumps from here. We're at Russel. The Empire is invading a Federation controlled system. They claim that the Federation sent scouts to soften up their defenses, but we know that's a load of osik. We were in the area mining and we would have noticed. We were just bringing our Cobra into Russel to upgrade the armor. Always good to have better armor. Then we were going to fly out and blast us some imps. You coming?"

"Sure thing! Let me go back to Cleve and get my Cobra." Risa announced.

"Meet you there in ten?" Camanion asked.

"Go Risa, Camanion, We need to talk to you real quick."

"What is it?" Camanion asked in a slightly wary tone.

"We're wondering if you can identify a sensation we get in combat."

"Fear?"

"Of course we get scared in combat, if you don't get scared in combat you're an idiot, but there's also a physical sensation. Sort of cold and spiky."

"Like someone's taken off your helmet and put it on upside down?" Camanion joked before leaning back in her chair and probably would have put her hands behind her head if she wasn't holding a black dual-stick gamepad with a digital directional pad and several face buttons. She called it an Xbox pad. We weren't sure what an Xbox was, but it wasn't our problem. We called this her "lecture" pose. "Well, now we know Fcon didn't block out all hormones. That's adrenaline. To quote a fictional warrior named Kal Skirata, 'so you tell yourself, okay, I can handle this. My body's now ready to run faster and fight harder, and I'll be seeing and hearing only the most important things I need to know to stay alive.'"

"Useful stuff," we commented.

"Best stimulant in nature. Even the strongest espresso is a drop in a bucket by comparison."

"Anyway, We'll meet Risa at Cleve and fly to the conflict zone."

* * *

"We've all got synthesis materials for our ammunition right?" we asked. Running out of ammo for our microcannons wasn't a good thing. It would take too long to travel from the combat zones to a station to rearm.

"Plenty of it!" Camanion chimed in

"I've got about a dozen refills." Risa added.

"Okay, We've set a course. Lock on to our computer and engage!"

* * *

"Let's see, High or Low intensity combat zone?" we asked.

"High," responded Risa and Camanion in perfect unison.

 _"Heghu'meH QaQ jajvam!"_ cried Camanion.

"What's that mean?" we asked

"Klingon, it means 'Today is a good day to die.'"

"We've got one, _'Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur,'_ Mandalorian, 'Today is a good day for someone else to die."

"I like it. Now… Whatever you just said." Risa butted in, "Moving in and dropping."

We followed Risa out of supercruise and into a warzone. Not that we didn't expect it, but it was a lot bigger than expected. "Well, we did agree on a high intensity zone." Camanion reminded, "Hardpoints out, let's vape us some imps!"

"C1, Break and Attack!" Risa added.

"C1?"

"Old video game, Wing Commander. Pressing C and then 1 on your keyboard was how you ordered your wingmate to break and attack." Camanion had already brought her first target's shields down and was pouring bullets into it.

We deployed our guns and opened up our contacts panel, selecting the first red contact. It didn't expect our attack, so we tore it apart with ease. The next three were the same. The fifth, noticing our attack and being a good pilot, was much harder to beat. We rerouted full power to weapons so we could continue to fire almost infinitely on a full capacitor. Our ship would overheat long before the lasers ran out of juice. The enemy shot past us, strafing with pulse lasers, which appropriately enough fired rapid pulses of coherent light.. This caused no problem for us with our very overspeced shields. The microcannon shots caused even less of an effect. We inverted and chewed on his shields until he broke the lock, spewing chaff in all directions. We patiently waited for the effect to dissipate before returning to his shields. He clearly had some sort of booster tech because his shields were powerful, but took a long time to recharge. Or maybe he just didn't put any power to systems. We were pressed into our seat as the inertial damper failed to keep up with our flip and roll, followed by a quick laser shot that finished off the enemy shields. This enemy seemed to be the sort to overspec shields and skimp on armor. The ship exploded within ten seconds.

"Ace!" we announced a quarter second before Camanion did. "How was that?"

"Not bad, not my record for taking down five enemies but better than I did this time. How many you got Risa?"

"Three and one with downed shields – make that four."

We spoke up. "Hey, anybody want some music? We forgot to turn ours on and it's hurting our performance."

"Sure, why not? I could do with a good rhythm." Risa commented, "Ace."

We ordered our ship to play our "Shooting Gallery" playlist, consisting of songs with a good beat for these situations.. Volume to 11 naturally. "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen started to blast from our cockpit speakers. We almost immediately noticed an increase in combat performance. Or maybe we were already at peak efficiency and it gave us the illusion. We were willing to give music's effect the benefit of the doubt, considering it did have an impact in hand-to-hand.

"Good choice. I prefer Bohemian Rapcity myself, but good choice," Camanion commented. "Out of curiosity, why did you ask instead of just listening to it?"

"Difference between the giant speakers in our ship and our internal audio systems. Double Ace."

"Hey DJ Geriatric, how about something more modern?" Risa piped up.

"Shut up Leeroy."

* * *

After ten minutes we were almost ready to leave when n unfamiliar alarm chimed on our control board.

"What's that?" we asked

Camanion let out a colorful stream of multilingual profanity before answering. "Majestic Class Interdictor. Biggest ship the Imps have. It's 2300 meters long and about 480 high. Not sure about the width. Impossible to destroy, but you can force it to retreat by knocking out it's heat relays. It's over. We can't beat it."

"Now, what have you told us about giving up?"

The massive warship dropped from FSD ten kilometers in front of us. It looked a lot like a predatory fish, with its tailfins jabbing out to form the corners of a triangle, its sloped back fuselage, forward stabilizer fins and drill-shaped bow. A formitable looking vessel.

We turned towards the ship, locking onto a relay. "You coming?"

"This won't end well, but I'm in," Camanion said.

"Mostly because I'm prone to peer pressure, let's dance," Risa added, turning towards the combat.

 _Warning: Entering Capital Ship Exclusion Zone_ announced our computer.. As soon as we breached the Zone a railgun started to track towards us. We hit our lateral thrusters and our roll, coming in at a spiral that would be very difficult to hit. It only took us a single pass to take out the heatsink. Camanion and Risa each took two passes. We quickly destroyed another, followed shortly by Camanion. Risa took hers out a minute later. "Four left!" we announced, "This is a lot easier than you claimed Camanion."

Two more heatsinks went up. A third was damaged before there was a detonation and our comms panel indicated that CMDR Turing's ship had been destroyed.

"RISA!" we cried out.

"Relax Composite, User remember? The problem is that now I'm out of the fight. And I probably lost the combat vouchers, so no cash this run. At least I got nine imp kills."

"You take Risa's heatsink. I'll take the last one." Camanion said

"You just want to steal the glory."

"Well yes. I'm also closer."

"Good point," we said, finishing off Risa's sink. The result was immediate.

"Blast! I forgot about this part. It's getting desperate. I'm out. You're our only hope," Camanion said, her ship exploding from a full broadside of railgun fire.

"You do remember that for you it's a video game with no consequences?"

"Yes, but it annoys Risa when I get melodramatic like this. Now go."

We cut our ship into a pattern that would have likely pulped a human, inertial compensator or no. The unpredictable nature of our flight made the railguns fail to get a lock, and the interceptor cannons simply weren't fast enough to hit. After about ten passes because our pattern made aiming difficult the sink exploded. _Frame Shift Charge Detected_ announced the ship AI. "It's routed," we announced. We grinned and derezed the visor we'd activated at the beginning of combat. Of course anyone who saw us would probably freak without seeing our face. In this dimension there was only one known nonhuman sentient species, in Imperial territory. It had been driven extinct by unknown means within years of the fledgeling Empire colonizing the moon Capitol. The interestingly named Empire of Achenar, after its capital star system, insisted the cause was accidental introduction of bacteria into Capitol's biosphere while the Galactic Federation had been crying genocide for the better part of one millennia.

"Hey, I didn't loose my combat vouchers!" Risa announced

"And the best part is they are Federation vouchers, not local government vouchers so we can redeem them anywhere in the Federation.," Camanion continued.

We set our course back to Cleve to meet up with the others.

* * *

"Hey Composite, guess what I just found in Lightfoot's notes?" Risa said excitedly.

"What?" Camanion and we asked at the same time.

"Well, once Fcon finished enhancing your telekinesis, they started to work on more conventional psionic powers. You're what many science Fiction fans such as me and Camanion call a half-telepath. What this means is you can communicate telepathically with other telepaths, but not with less psychically gifted individuals. Strangely, you have no empathic abilities."

"And speaking of powers, check out what I built!" Camanion said happily, zooming down a corridor, presumably to activate the appropriate webcam in her lab. We noticed something odd about her movement.

"Hey Camanion, is it just us, or did your legs not move at all while you were leaving the room?"

"I finished my antigrav boots. They put out a light repulsor field and I just tip my feet where I want to go."

"Why not use your telekinesis?"

"My TK isn't nearly as strong as yours. It's like a muscle, it needs to be strengthened. I can't use it for such trivialities as walking except when I'm exercising. To continue with the muscle analogy, you're stronger because Fcon shot you full of steroids somehow without breaking anything. Anyway," the feed of Camanion's empty chair was replaced by part of her lab, displaying some sort of large laser turret, "Can you guess what this is?"

"A laser?"

"No crap, what type?"

"Some sort of weapon?"

"You jump to conclusions. It's a digitizer. I stole the schematics from Fcon. And I recreated the correction algorithms. I also converted it to a software module for you. Try it." Camanion sent us a file containing the subroutine. We installed it to our left forearm. Combat on the right, Utility on the left. We clenched our left fist and the laser popped from a slot that appeared on the forearm.

"On what?" we asked.

"These schematics," Camanion sent us a schematic for a quantum network link device for our ship, presumably to control it between dimensions and over long distance, and a dimensional hyperdrive so small it could transport even the largest Federal Corvette or Anaconda without taking up an internal compartment.

"How? We'd need to digitize them first so we can de-digitize them."

"And that is the next part of my invention. So, school time. How does a digitizing laser work?"

"It… Doesn't it create a digital map of the target, storing its atoms in the laser assembly? But doesn't it use the same atoms in the same place?"

"Close! It puts the atoms and molecules in the correct pattern yes, but it only gets the right atomic type and isotopes in the right place. It doesn't try and put the exact same atom in the exact same place. It just slaps an identical atom where it's necessary. I removed the software limit that requires the same atoms go with the same construct, and refined it to subatomic particles, protons, electrons, neutrons, photons, and so on. The downside is that I wouldn't recommend digitizing a living organism more complex than a fungus or maybe a nonvascular plant like a moss." Camanion pointed at a vaguely flower-like shape in a containment tube. It was very off-color and seemed to be dripping slightly.

"So what do you want us to do, buy a ton of scrap metal and digitize it for parts?"

"That would work, but it's not the best way. Enter the Resource Unit, or RU.""

"RU?"

"No, Arr-You, RU," Camanion pulled a small cuboid out of Hammerspace, "A collection of subatomic particles neatly in one place. This is a single milli-RU." She pointed at a refrigerator-sized box in the corner. "That's a full RU. The best part is they're easy to transport over a digital stream. Prepare for resource injection."

"Transmission received. So how do we make RUs?"

Camanion hung her head in mock shame, "Currently you don't. I make them using a modified D'ni fusion compactor. The thing used to make Nara stone. 50 times denser than steel and the strongest stone known to D-"

"We know Holmes, get to the point."

We distantly heard Risa yell something like "Is it denser than you?" Which Camanion promptly ignored.

"Well, I call my modified compactor a 'Phased Disassembler Array,' or PDA, after a machine from my favorite Real Time Strategy game series Homeworld, the same place I got the name RU from. The problem is I haven't converted the PDA to a subroutine yet. Not for lack of trying. But I'll be happy to wire you some any time, no questions asked. Just no chemical weapons. Those are nasty."

"Yeah, Irras had a lot of old war footage from Earth. Used it as part of his self-admittedly half-baked conspiracy theories about Human invasion. The ones even he didn't believe." We pointed the digitizer at the deck of our ship and stated "Digitize!"

A beam of blindingly bright light shot out of the laser on our forearm and jumped around the shape of the Link module for our ship before the completed module dropped to the ground and the laser formed the hyperdrive module. We quickly installed both units.

"And one more thing. Something I discovered a while ago but didn't have the tech to do anything with. Still don't. When a fiction author creates a story, it creates a residual link to an alternate reality in the Multiverse. I have the equipment to track the signatures, and to issolate them, the only thing I don't have is a way to bridge the gap. You do. I'm sending you the scanner algorithms. I hope you find them useful. Anyway, it's late. I need sleep. And I bet you need a few regeneration cycles."

"Actually, no we don't. We need roughly one in 24 processing cycles to be a rest cycle, but we can save it up. So if we were to regenerate for 24 hours we'd be good for almost a month. Or we could go the other way and stay awake for most of a month and then sleep for a day. This is, of course, using a standard Solar calendar."

"Either way, I've gotta turn in soon. So I'll see you in the morning sister."

"Sister?"

"You know, a female sibling."

"We know what a sister is. We're wondering why you called us a sister. We're your clone."

"Yes, the appropriate biological term for me would be a template, but if you mention your template Camanion, people would look at you funny. I'm most certainly not your mother, so sister. Just like Risa is both my creation and my adopted sister."

"Sounds good to us. See you in the morning."

"Same to you Sis!" Risa announced in a cheerful and slightly malicious tone, "And now that we're sisters, I've got plenty of sibling rivalry to plan."

* * *

 **And on that note I'm closing this story down. I do wonder how Camanion can afford her laid-back lifestyle… Best not to ask. *Cough* I'm still working on it. I'm working on a new story that will most likely be the main one that I go to between other stories. It's a somewhat niche web and magazine series. Anyone familiar with it will have a pretty good idea which one based on the two clues I've put in, the red-horned phone from Chapter 2 and Camanion's cattleprod collecting last chapter. I may spin this Elite arc into its own story based on Camanion and Risa's adventures, but that's somewhat unlikely unless I can get some serious exploration on in Elite Dangerous so as to have places to go.**

 **Sorry it's taken me so long to get this one up. I've been spending way too much time hacking my way through Chicago, STALKing around Chernobyl and… uh… anybody got one for Minecraft?**

 **I'm hoping that FF doesn't touch Camanion's Klingon battle cry. When writing Klingon using the latin alphabet it looks quite strange. Capitalization is very important, and is not done at the beginning of a sentence. It's a phonetic thing. For example, the lowercase q sounds a little like you're choking. The uppercase Q sounds a lot like you're choking. Not to mention the apostrophe, which is even more important in Klingon than it is in D'ni, which is saying something.**

 **Shoutout this week goes to brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, creators of the Myst series. Enough said.**

 **I recently started playing Mass Effect. I also discovered that Composite is a near perfect match for the Vanguard specialty. That was a coincidence on my part, at least consciously. The fact that I briefly watched a couple Mass Effect videos on YouTube which included character creation may have had some subconscious influence. At least Composite is as close to perfect as possible. The Vanguard has bionic TK powers and can only use pistols and shotguns for attack. Why I chose a shotgun for Composite is probably because the first FPS I ever played was the legendary DOOM by id Software. Its shotgun has a very long range due to no maximum range on the weapon and the pellet spread works in a fashion where bullets spread slightly as soon as they leave the weapon and then go straight away from you until they hit something. Thereby absolutely overpowered.**

 **I honestly don't know how a capital ship battle works because I've never played one.**

 **So, until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging Out!**

 **Sorry about any formatting errors, I'm using the Cut and Paste input method and editing in the FF editor. Don't ask.**


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